This article is
contributed by the author Sue (Hopkins)
Cooley and printed here with
her permission. (5/13/98) Excerpted
from
Gleanings from the Past and Present
By Sue (Hopkins)
Cooley, SCooley@foxcomm.com
St. Clair
Missourian [newspaper for St. Clair, Missouri]
published in
Wednesday April 22, 1998 edition (amended)
Ruth
Bardot of the Luebbering area called me this week and
told me a story I thought was worthwhile to share with the
readers. Her cousin, Joseph Claude "J.C." Sanders, born in
1926, had passed this bit of family legend on to her.
Her grandfather,
Heinrich Christian "Lewis" Bruns, was born April 15, 1873 at
Kelso, Missouri, a town that is part of present-day Scott City.
He was a railroad engineer when the railroad bridge was
built at Cape Girardeau. This is the bridge we have been
hearing about in the news that was recently struck by
barges a day or so after a barge struck the Admiral in St.
Louis.
After the
railroad bridge was completed, Lewis Bruns and several other
engineers drove 33 train engines out onto the bridge and parked
them to be sure the bridge would hold a train safely! He was the
engineer in the second engine to drive out on the bridge!
Lewis was the father
of Ruth's mother, Ruth, who married Ancel Wallace. They lived at
Lonedell Lakes, which was then owned by Jack Patrick and called
Back of the Moon.
Ruth Bardot
(314-629-3792) has a photograph of her grandfather beside an
engine. Edison Schrum has a photograph of the 33 engines on the
bridge in one of his books.
