- [Jim] It's an urban farm with historical roots and seeds, reviving crops that often end up on the table of one of St. Louis's most unusual restaurants.

- At the end of the night, it's gonna be the best contemporary interpretation of historic Ozark cuisine that they've ever had because it's the only one they've ever had.

- Long before Andy Williams was drawing crowds to Branson, it was this book that had tourists seeking out the Ozark experience.

We stop in at the Campbell House for an American version of upstairs, downstairs, and our election year story takes us back to 1872 and the St. Louis woman who went all the way to the US Supreme Court, pretty sure she was going to lose.

It's all next on "Living St. Louis".

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) I'm Jim Kirchherr and I tried a few new things this year.

Tried a Pawpaw from a neighborhood tree, just as spoonful and it wasn't bad.

I also made some tea from the leaves and flowers of a bee balm plant in my yard, also, not too bad, but that's about as adventurous as I'm gonna get when it comes to foraging for food.

I'm not really a dandelion wine kind of guy, but the guy in Brooke Butler's story, he is all that and a whole lot more.

In fact, at his restaurant, the dishes are so unusual they have to be explained, but that's okay 'cause it's part of the unique dining experience.

- [Rob] All right, thank y'all for joining us tonight.

For those of you who haven't been here before, what we do at Bulrush is we're trying to define Ozark food.

What?

- I'm like just confused.

- You should be.

So your next.

- [Brooke] Rob Connolly is the chef and owner at Bulrush, a restaurant trying to, as you heard, define Ozark cuisine.

And yes, the confusion is a very normal, if not encouraged, part of the Bulrush dining experience.

- When people come in, I know at the end of the night, it's gonna be the best contemporary interpretation of historic Ozark cuisine that they've ever had because it's the only one they've ever had.

- [Brooke] When Rob made the decision to start his own restaurant, which officially opened in 2019, he started exploring the food from his childhood.

With generations of family from St. Genevieve, he quickly realized there wasn't a whole lot of interesting food that originated from that area for modern dinners.

- The way it progressed though, is I started looking at old church cookbooks and the church cookbooks led me to family stories, oral tradition and ultimately the archives that I found down in the Ozarks and the idea that there aren't positive portrayals of the Ozarks in popular culture mass media.

In three and a half years, I've not had one.

Even people living in that area, the best they can do is family memories and so I realize there's something bigger at stake here.

So what is Ozark cuisine?

Well, I mean there's this one angle that I take in the food.

Sometimes I take a letter, let's say from 1820 from a settler who came to the area and was writing home to mom back in Boston, said, Mom, I made it.

And I thought, well that would be a lot of fun looking at how that first interaction happened between the indigenous people who were already there, the settlers who came into the area, and oftentimes the settlers would bring the enslaved.

Those three cultures create the food that we eat now in this region and so honoring those cultures and exploring those cultures, that's what became interesting.

- [Brooke] So that's one way, but there's also a more direct way to research what Ozark natives ate through Paleoethnobotany, which essentially studies how humans interact with plants.

- I serve people things like lambsquarter or purslane.

And people say, well that's the weed in my garden that I pull out.

I say yeah, it is and it's nutritious and it's everywhere and in many cases they're native to the area.

- [Brooke] So far a pretty straightforward, yet unique way to share Ozark cuisine.

But Rob doesn't stop there, because it's not just the actual foods he wants to cultivate.

It's the processes and methods in which people native to the Ozarks used.

For example, Rob explains gigging for suckers, which is night fishing with a spear instead of a hook and line or recreating historic vessels used to preserve, ferment or cook.

Rob also forages year round for ingredients like mushrooms, Pawpaws, native plants and his team even takes part in animal butchers.

- One of the projects that's really exciting to us is what we call the 1841 Seed Project, an inventory from 1841 from a seed store here in town.

Of the 95 seeds listed, 70 of 'em you could get today on burpee or any Baker's Creek or any of the other seed catalogs.

So the 25 were the ones that were of interest to us.

So we were able to grow 23 of the 25.

And all those seeds we know had been gone from this area for generations, some well over 100 years.

Things like radish or watermelon where I can give you 20 watermelon side by side so you can taste the difference of each of the watermelons and the history behind each of those and why they were important in this area back in the early 19th century.

- Part of the Bulrush dining experience is for diners to learn about the history of the food being served, including those being grown in the 1841 Seed Project.

And as you heard, it's easy for Rob to go into great detail about this process.

And as we found out after meeting one of the farmers growing these rare seeds, he's not alone in his passion for culinary history.

(upbeat music) Tyrean Heru Lewis is one of the farmers working with Rob to grow Mountain Yellow watermelons.

This is amongst the other dozen or so varieties that Tyrean is also growing, which he considers his specialty crop.

- Man watermelon's crazy, like when you get into the watermelon, like it's all different varieties, different types.

They all similar but different.

You got to really look close to 'em and see the difference of 'em.

- [Brooke] Tyrean started growing his own food in buckets in his backyard because of the difficulty finding fresh produce in the city.

It wasn't until after he started his own farming business that he realized it ran in the family.

- You know, I'm a fifth generational farmer too.

I didn't know that until I started farming.

Went to a family reunion, I found out my great, great uncle of 1939 in Lamar County in Paris, Texas, he started an all black co-op down there and they grew tomatoes.

That's unheard of in that time in the south.

So I guess it's just somebody's born to do.

Yeah, so I like blessing everything and I pay homage to my ancestors.

So in the hood we got a thing where you pour some liquor for your dead homies, right?

So it's the same thing, same energy, just, you know, same concept.

So I pour libations, ashay, ashay like amen, kind of, giving thanks.

So I say my great grandma, ashay.

So just bring the energy in, you know, to help me out.

And really it's really them growing, it's for real in my hands, like I got blessed hands, I really believe that.

- [Brooke] But having blessed hands doesn't prevent interventions from Mother Nature.

- Yep, this is a Mountain Yellow right here.

Yep, that's.

- [Brooke] Those are the ones that you're growing for Rob?

- Yep, this is the one, he (indistinct).

You smelling good too, man.

Oh man, they got into my, oh, one of my big ones.

So it started off promising.

First harvest was pretty cool, you know, but we had a flood here in St. Louis.

It affected my watermelon in a strange way.

So we got a lot of skunks out here, which I know that, but they never mess with anything ever of mine.

So I guess the rain kind of like made the skunks come up from out the creek, I think so.

And I think the water put the smell out, right?

and then once they smelt it, they came and ate it and then, you know, once you get one and get a taste of it, you know, just like humans, you know, you get it and it's good, you gonna tell everybody.

So I believe the skunks told they friends and they family members and now they having a good time on it.

- The skunks destroyed upwards of $2,000 worth of watermelon, something Tyrean takes as a learning opportunity, which he tells me about over sharing a slice of watermelon that he was able to salvage.

And for all the hype and anticipation, I have to be honest, I mean it tastes like watermelon.

What do you think you're gonna do different next year?

I mean.

- Man, I've been thinking about a lot of stuff.

I always think in life, the universe is always sending you messages, even if it's good or bad, right?

So you just gotta take a message outta everything.

So I'm thinking to myself, what did I do?

I'm like man, life is like (indistinct).

Everything is connected, all right?

You plant seeds, something grow, right?

I don't even eat food for somebody that's cooking and they're in a bad mood, 'cause your energy is going in your food, right?

They say soul food, soul cooking, I think soul (indistinct), watermelon talk.

(laughs) - [Brooke] Seeds of life, watermelon talk.

- Yep, those too, seeds of life.

There you go, okay, okay.

(laughs) - All right guys, your next course is a library of watermelons.

- [Brooke] Finding community partners like Tyrean who share the enthusiastic philosophies of food like Rob does, show us how Bulrush has been successful.

It's not your average pizza place that spends years researching their ingredients.

But if nothing else, Rob wants diners to have a good meal because sometimes the methods of how they assemble courses doesn't always go according to plan.

- One of our farmers in that seed project is growing a potato that's extremely, extremely rare in the United States, it's called Rowan Potato.

We thought it was extinct and we've now grown this twice, but this is as big as they're getting.

- [Brooke] But it's not necessarily about the end result.

Part of the Bulrush philosophy is giving credit where credit is long overdue.

- I work really hard to bring people in who can tell their own story, whether it's an African American farmer or an indigenous chef.

I think that is a more powerful and lasting message to be shared.

That's a lot of haughty, philosophic stuff to be bringing into a restaurant when quite frankly we scramble every day just to get food done and out.

The second it feels like we're a museum or we're a novelty, it's not interesting to me anymore because at that point, why am I doing it?

I'm not doing this to be a circus side show.

I'm doing this because no one has done this work before and it's really exciting to dig into this information.

And food is a safe way to get history into people's heads.

If I said come to a lecture, I'll get 20 people.

If I say come to a meal, I'll get thousands.

Yeah, thank y'all for joining us tonight.

- A lot of people these days head to the Ozarks, not for the food, but for the fishing and the boating, the scenery, of course the entertainment at Branson, but it wasn't always that way.

But you might be surprised to know that the start of the Ozark tourism boom really started back in 1907.

That was the year that Harold Bell Wright's "The Shepherd of the Hills" came out, a best seller that really introduced the rest of America and the world to the Missouri Ozarks where the story was set and tourists, they started heading to the then obscure, small, unincorporated town of Branson, it wasn't even on the map at the time, to see some of the real buildings like Uncle Ikes Post Office that had played a role in the fictional story.

"The Shepherd of the Hills" was made into several movies.

The first a 1919 silent film described as "a delightful story of the Ozarks, "portraying the lives of these hardy mountaineers "who are as clean cut and unaffected "by the veneer of civilization "as the rock bound hills in which they live".

Another film came out in 1941, this one starring John Wayne.

And then there's this.

- [Announcer] "The Shepherd of the Hills" Outdoor Drama is a full production show bringing to life the classic American novel by Harold Bell Wright.

- The outdoor dramatization was first staged in Branson in 1960.

It's got horses and wagons, dozens of cast members, a gun fight and the nightly burning of a cabin.

The book that started it all though, it's not read so much anymore and yet probably still ranks as one of the most popular novels set in Missouri not written by Mark Twain.

The Campbell House here in downtown St. Louis is a really interesting place.

But you know, for a long time, like a lot of historic homes, the interest was in, well the house itself, the period furniture and the Campbell family history.

But in more recent times, as Ruth Ezell shows us, people have been digging deeper into the everyday lives of all the people here, not just those who were sitting in the parlor.

- [Ruth] The one room exhibit at the Campbell House may not be large, but the stories it tells shed light on a little known aspect of this St. Louis gilded age family.

They are the stories of the servants who worked for the Campbells in the 19th and 20th centuries.

- This first panel here tells the story of those 19th century servants.

They're a group of people who are primarily immigrants from places like Ireland and Germany who came to work here, typically for only a few years at a time.

- [Ruth] The domestic staff of the 20th century tended to be American born and they stayed a lot longer.

But the most intriguing section of the exhibit, centers on a woman in the household whose existence was uncovered during research over the past decade.

Her name was Eliza Countee Rone, an African American and a slave.

- We don't know how she came to St. Louis.

She was born in Virginia.

We don't know how the Campbells came to own her, but what we do know is by the late 1840s, she's probably enslaved by the Campbells here in St. Louis.

When they move into the Campbell House here in 1854, Eliza comes with them.

- [Ruth] So what was Rone's role in the Campbell household?

A court document indicates she was a washer woman, but at some point Rone was entrusted with the care of Robert and Virginia Campbell's children.

- Unlike the other domestics who are talked about in this exhibit, Eliza was the nanny, which in many ways made her closer than any other domestic.

Now, part of that reason is probably is she didn't have her freedom and so she couldn't leave or quit.

But at the same time she did have somewhat of a privileged role in this house as the nanny.

(train chugs) Before 1857, we know that the Campbells regularly traveled east and Eliza was the nanny.

(train whistle sounds) We know that Eliza was in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where there was no such thing as slavery.

But here she's brought along as part of the Campbell's property and the Campbells wouldn't have been unusual in doing that necessarily.

Eliza saw a lot of different things.

I wonder what she felt like walking the streets of Philadelphia where she knew that there was no such thing as slavery in Pennsylvania and yet here she was owned by the Campbells.

You know, she couldn't control her own destiny and what that must have felt like, her to come back to St. Louis.

In some ways we think that was, she felt good about coming back to St. Louis, 'cause her husband was here.

He was not owned by the Campbells.

He lived here as a free man and so I'm sure that impacted her thinking.

- [Ruth] In any event, in January of 1857, Robert Campbell freed Eliza Rone and her two young sons.

- The first real concrete evidence and that gave us Eliza a last name, was her emancipation record.

And that's what's shown here on this panel.

Here on the bottom is a enlarged version of the Circuit Court ledger book, which notes Robert Campbell coming into open court and acknowledging that he has executed a deed of emancipation for a young woman named Eliza, along with her two small children.

The next day it appears in the newspaper, and that's what this is, noting basically the same thing that happened in court.

- To put Eliza Rone's emancipation into historical perspective, it happened at a time when hundreds of Missouri slaves, many of them women were filing so-called freedom suits in court and winning.

And just a few months after Rone's emancipation, the United States Supreme Court handed down a ruling in which Dred Scott was denied his bid for freedom.

That fateful decision was a key factor in sparking the Civil War.

Rone continued to work for the Campbells as a paid employee after gaining her freedom.

- When Mrs. Campbell dies in 1882, she leaves two bequests in her will, one to her sister, her only sister, and one to Eliza.

And we think this speaks to a kind of a very unique relationship.

- Following the end of the Civil War in the late 1860s, John and Eliza Rone settled their family in Kansas City, Missouri, where many of their descendants still live.

Eliza Rone died in 1923.

The image of Eliza Rone you see in the exhibit is not a likeness of her, but an imagining of what she may have looked like based on written descriptions.

The Campbell House is hoping one day to obtain a photograph of Rone through one of her descendants.

- We've been welcoming people here for a long time.

We've been telling the story.

You think what else can possibly be new?

- [Ruth] But the discoveries continue.

(soft music) - Finally, in this election year, we bring you a story about voting rights and activism, debates, division, and a US Supreme Court ruling, story takes place in St. Louis in 1872.

It's about a woman who set out to stir things up and it's about her husband who was right there with her, Virginia Minor was part of the women's suffrage movement, gaining momentum after the Civil War.

She wouldn't live nearly long enough to see the passage of the 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote, but she wasn't going to wait for that anyway.

- So in 1872, Virginia Minor, a St. Louis woman attempts to register to vote.

- [Jim] Elizabeth Eikmann researched Minor's story while working on her PhD in American Studies.

- Goes in, meets the registrar, Reese Happersett and attempts to register to vote for the presidential election happening just a month later.

She meets Reese Happersett and he denies her attempt to register to vote on the basis that she isn't male.

- She knows this is going to happen, I'm guessing.

- Yes.

- Missouri's constitution at the time, limited voting to men only.

Virginia Minor had not broken any law by trying to register.

But she argued that based on the US Constitution, it was the registrar who broke the law by turning her away and took that argument to the courthouse downtown.

(soft, dramatic music) Was it meant to be a test case?

Was that what they were attempting to do there?

- Yeah, I think so.

They were ready, they had a plan and they were gonna see how far they could take it.

I think that there hadn't been a case like this before, certainly not with the argument that they brought forth.

- The they she's talking about is Virginia Minor and her husband Francis Minor.

They moved to St. Louis before the Civil War, bought a farm east of King's Highway right here.

And he was an attorney and hardly a bystander in all of this.

In fact, Virginia Minor literally could not have made her case without him.

- Per Missouri law, Virginia wouldn't have been able to bring this suit forth by herself.

It was illegal for married women to sue.

So he, if you look at old court documents, you'll see it's his name and her name in everything.

So it was a joint suit, very much a joint effort.

And he was one of the three attorneys that also represented the case.

- While she was the one who tried to register to vote, Francis Minor had prepared the legal argument.

And after losing in Circuit Court and then the Missouri Supreme Court, he ended up arguing the case in the highest court in the country.

- She was the first to argue on the basis of the 14th Amendment that actually as they argued, women already had the right to vote.

- [Jim] The recently passed 14th Amendment to the US Constitution was designed to give African Americans and former slaves the full rights of US citizenship.

And the Minors zeroed in on this sentence, "no state shall make or enforce any law "which shall abridge the privileges or immunities "of the citizens of the United States".

They argued that voting was one of those privileges and since Mrs. Minor was a citizen, she had the privilege of voting, even if Missouri's constitution said otherwise.

The Supreme Court unanimously disagreed.

Chief Justice Morrison Waite read the ruling that voting had never been one of the privileges of citizenship, that the Constitution does not confer the right of suffrage on anybody.

That the court said is up to the states and Missouri is free to limit that right to men only.

This was news because Virginia Minor's action, the legal challenge in 1872, was much more than a local story and it was meant to be.

- It was most definitely part of a larger movement.

So in St. Louis specifically, there's evidence that a movement had been growing since at least the mid 1860s, but I suspect even likely before then.

- The women's suffrage movement in the US marks its beginning in the 1840s.

It was to some extent put on hold during the Civil War, but many women came out of the war years more determined than ever to achieve that right to vote.

Like other women, Virginia Minor had volunteered in Union Army hospitals in St. Louis, she worked with a group that helped refugees that had streamed in from southern battlefields.

She and many other women during the Civil War had served their country.

It kind of reminds me of the way women felt when they were working during World War II, the Rosie and the Riveters and redefining their role in society.

- Yes, absolutely, without a doubt, women saw a connection between their work during the Civil War and the work that they would eventually do in the suffrage movement.

So they sort of became mobilized during this moment of the Civil War.

It's ended and they're thinking, okay, what can we do next as citizens?

How can we best perform our citizenship?

How can we best be an engaged citizenry?

And for them, that was to be involved in the political process and to vote.

- [Jim] The ruling in Virginia Minor's case was important because it made clear to the suffrage movement that the constitutional argument would not work and suffragists focused efforts either on winning the vote state by state, or promoting a constitutional amendment.

They did win the vote in many states in the coming years and finally for the whole country when the 19th Amendment took effect 100 years ago.

But even then, Minor versus Happersett still had relevance because states still did have powers over voting and they would use it.

- Their narrow defining of the 14th Amendment really changed how states approached suffrage and how they put limits on suffrage.

So this is where we get a sort of precedent for literacy tests or poll taxes that come in the decades that follow that limit who has access to voting, whether or not they have some kind of right to it.

- [Jim] After losing their case, Virginia and Francis Minor kept fighting the fight.

His 1892 obituary said that together with his wife, Francis Minor was an efficient and untiring advocate of women's suffrage.

Virginia Minor died two years later at the age of 72.

The paper noted that there were no religious services and also reported that in her will, she would leave her two nieces $500 each as long as they didn't marry.

- So maybe she was hoping for a future in which women would be able to make gains without having to be married and wanted to pass that on to her nieces.

- She left on her terms as well.

- Yes, exactly, she left on her terms.

(bright music) - Virginia Minor, who spent most of her life fighting for the right to vote is not one of the big names associated with the American Women's Suffrage Movement.

At the end of her life, she had not achieved her goal, but in her will, she also left $1000 to Susan B. Anthony to carry on the fight.

(bright music) And that's "Living St. Louis".

Thanks for joining us, I'm Jim Kirchherr and we'll see you next time.

(upbeat music) - [Ruth] "Living St. Louis" is made possible by the support of the Betsy and Thomas Patterson Foundation, the Mary Ranken Jordan and Eddie A. Jordan Charitable Trust, and by the members of Nine PBS.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues)