Let's Go Places: Jefferson City, Bentonville, and Indianapolis

 

Picking it up from where we left off last time...we've just had two action packed days in St. Louis and we're now wheels up to Jefferson City.

First Stop - Let's Get Some Dome!

I arrived at Jefferson City around 10:30, in plenty of time for the 11:00 tour.  I parked near the Amtrak station and made the short walk to the capitol.

The Big Fun Fact about Missouri's capitol is that it came in wildly under budget.  There was a surplus of $1.5M, and the decision was made to spend the extra on art.  The halls are lined with these murals, which have optical illusions.  In this picture, the size of the trees shifts as you walk past it.

In the 1930s a room sized mural of the history of Missouri was commissioned in the House Lounge, to very mixed reviews.

When I say "mixed reviews" I mean that the mural was hated at the time, and that the lounge members (read: members of the Missouri House of Representatives aka Elected Officials) were not shy about expressing their feelings through vandalism.  The gentleman seated at the table with his back to us was later convicted of some kind of corruption charge, and someone defaced the picture with his convict number.

It was also a thing to stub out your cigarettes and cigars on the baby's bottom.

Later on the mural was restored and the practice of politicians vandalizing state property went out of fashion.

One of the things that I track on these tours is whether the guide calls out fossils in stone work.  Early in the tour, the guide checked the box by pointing out some ordinary, run of the mill fossils.

And then he made a bid to make Missouri #1 in the fossil game.  At this point I have toured 22 capitols so fair point that there are 28 states that could take the lead, but it is safe to say that the bar has been raised.  That's right, someone has to come up with something more awesome than a shark's tooth in their stonework.  May the best capitol win!

I walked out of the capitol and into the thing that I was not expecting, which was an epic rain storm that showed no signs of stopping.  I sucked it up and swam back to the car.

I split my time between waiting in the car at the capitol and then driving the five minutes to my next stop and waiting in the car there just for the variety in parking.  Finally the rain slowed and I was back in action. 

Second Stop - Let's Go to Jail!

The number one tourist attraction of Jefferson City, Missouri is not the capitol.  It is the Missouri State Penitentiary.  This was a maximum security prison that was in operation from the 1830s to 2004, and bore the nickname of "the bloodiest 47 acres in America".

This is my third prison visit in my travels, the other two being the Ohio State Reformatory (aka Shawshank) and Alcatraz.  The best way that I can think of to describe the experience is "it's complicated."

Our tour guide was Larry Neal, who worked for the prison for 20 years in maintenance.  The prison was overcrowded from the get-go, and always had a steady stream of new residents.  Due to staffing shortages, the prison relied on the inmates to keep order, which was a situation that had advantages and disadvantages.  See the tagline about the 47 acres above for an example of a disadvantage.

The tour was a mix of horrible and very funny stories, mirroring what life was like for the prisoners.  There was once a prisoner who ran a restaurant out of his cell, and did his cooking on an old coffee can placed over a lightbulb, which was hot enough to cook pancakes and to fry eggs.

One of Larry's stories was about the time he saw two officers in line with the convicts waiting for pancakes.  He said that once he told this story on a tour and someone in the audience shouted out "that's a lie!".  The person said that they had been an officer at the prison.  Larry repeated that he had in fact seen officers in line for food.  The heckler was not disputing that the officers ate the food, they just said that there is no way that they would have stood in line - they would have cut to the front and been served first.  The heckler and Larry agreed that the officers that he saw must have been new on the job.

Prison brings out interesting human quirks, and so does the prison tour experience.  Larry pointed out the stone column outside of the showers and said "if you would like to have the experience of sitting where thousands of naked men have sat, go ahead".  Very few people sat down.

And yet when we got to the gas chamber, nearly everyone took a seat.

If you're curious, I did what everyone else did.

You might be wondering why I mentioned the tour guide's name let alone remembered it.  Larry worked at the prison until it closed, and at the time there was a call for everyone to write up their memories.  He started writing down his work stories, but wasn't sure what to do with them after that.  Luckily his daughter is a journalist, and she helped him to get his tales into book form.  Before the tour was over a copy of Unguarded Moments: Stories of Working Inside the Missouri State Penitentiary was on my Kindle.

I spent an uneventful night in Jefferson City and the next morning I was wheels up for Mansfield, Missouri.

Third Stop - Two Little Houses Not on the Prairie

2026 has been a year of reconnecting with my childhood idols. First Rosa Parks and Helen Keller back in February, and now the GOAT, Laura Ingalls Wilder.

It came to my attention that many of the Little House sites have been preserved from the podcast Wilder.  I'm not ruling out visiting additional sites in the future, but it was clear that the Mothership is the Laura Ingalls Wilder Home and Museum in Mansfield, Missouri, and it's been on my travel wish list for some time.  

The first thing that caught my eye was the business across the street.  Bravo!

The visit starts at the museum, and if we're being honest, museums are not my favorite.  I try to be an adult, but I often get bored and find myself looking at what I've described as "buildings full of stuff".

However, this museum was different.  I poured over every last item and left with a phone full of pictures.

The skeptic in me says "oh come on, would they really have kept their school slates?" and the little girl in me does not care one bit whether these are the "real" slates or not.

Before starting the house tours, I visited the gift shop, where Jack the Bulldog got his due.

I was tickled to no end that he is splooting.

It was now time for the house tours.  After the events in the final Little House book, The First Four Years, the Wilders moved from North Dakota to Missouri in search of their Forever Farm, which they found in Mansfield.  After many hard years, the farm was successful and their Forever House followed.

Laura was 4'11" and the counters were built for her height.

She had a wood burning stove, but later got a small electric one.  She called it her "summer" stove.

Laura did not like bread making, and according to the guide, the part she hated the most was kneading when the dough would get all over her hands.  At this point my thought was "same, girl, same."  But since they couldn't just run out to the grocery store, she had to make bread.  As a sweetener, Almanzo gave her a good view from her bread making station.

The other kitchen notable is that there wasn't a great place for the refrigerator, so Rose had someone build a bump out so that it would fit into the wall.

Meanwhile, here is where Laura did her writing, in a small room between the bedroom and the living room.

This was their forever house, but it was not their only house.  By the late 20s Rose had become a successful author, had spare cash, and wanted to flex, so she built a "nicer" house on the property.  Laura and Almanzo lived there until the early 30s when the economic tide had turned and no one was flexing.  At that point they rented out the stone house and moved back to their forever home.  Did they move because they could get better rent on the new house or was it because they preferred their forever house?  It feels like both factors were at play.

As the tour progressed, I started getting a yen to reread the Little House books, and of course I still own my O.G. kid copies, so I figured that I would start when I got home.  But then the other people on the tour started talking about the audio books, so my reread started on the way home.

After the museum I made one more Little House stop.

Naturally Rose's grave is next to her parents, but I didn't notice it at first.  It only registered when I was leaving and saw the manifesto on the back.  If you've ever heard that there's a hint of Libertarianism in the Little House books, Rose is the source for that.  There is nothing on the back of Laura and Almanzo's stone.

Let's Go to Bentonville!

Sigh, then it was time to move on to the last stop of the journey.  The previous day's rain had given way to an epic heat wave, which put a damper on my Bentonville activities.

The next day I headed over to a place called Crystal Bridges, which is the site of the Frank Lloyd Wright Bachman-Wilson House.

The two things to tell you about the tour is that (1) no photos were allowed and (2) this is a very rare Usonian two story house.  However, the staircase is a floating staircase which is suitable for a private home but not for a home that has been turned into a museum and has hundreds of visitors everyday.  For that reason, the tour was of the ground floor only.  It was still very much worth the time and effort to drive there.

The house was built in New Jersey, but over time the area became prone to flooding so the house needed a new place to live.  Crystal Bridges took the owners up on the offer and relocated the house to Arkansas.

After the tour I wandered around the ground of Crystal Bridges.  It's an indoor/outdoor museum, with many joys such as this mirrored wall.

I walked along the path for a bit and saw the last thing that I expected to see, which was a giant spider sculpture.

This is Crystal Bridges in Bentonville, Arkansas

I'm not particularly afraid of spiders, so the reason why it was unexpected is that I'd seen it before.  Anyone 'member our trip to Ottawa last November?

This is right outside the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

I knew right away that these were not similar spideys, they were identical.  I asked Google to confirm, and you can click the link to get the sweet but weird story of Maman ("mother", yep that's why the spidey sculpture is called).  The statue in Ottawa is the original and there were six copies made from the same mold which are located in: Bentonville, Kansas City, Spain, Japan, South Korea, and Qatar.  So this is the second time but presumably not the last time that I will see Maman.

I continued to walk around Crystal Bridges and saw more art, both in the form of museum pieces and in the form of nature.

I had one more stop to make in Bentonville, which was a "when in Rome" thing.  It was...underwhelming.  But that's just my opinion.

Let's Go Home!

It was time to start heading back.  I spent the night in Rolla, Missouri, and the next morning I was wheels up to the most logical place to spend the last night of the trip.

Indianapolis!!!

If you're new here, my family made many visits to Indianapolis when I was a young 'un, and I did a long weekend trip there two years ago.  I didn't have anything specific that I wanted to do there, but it is a place that I do not mind going when I get the chance.

Since most of this trip was single night stays, I'd been staying mostly in hotels, and mostly with an eye on the budget.  Hotels can be very reasonable in Indy, but for some reason they were very expensive at the moment.  Speaking of expensive, I was also craving a somewhat nicer stay.

Oh hey, the Hyatt Regency was available for a very reasonable points redemption.  There's no better budget option than free.

The hotel was so fancy that it had a commode phone.

[I have no reason to ever use a landline so I did not make use of this luxury feature.  But I was sure tempted!]

That night I treated myself to my #1 preferred Indianapolis dinning experience, which is The Olde Spaghetti Factory (throwback to childhood), and the next morning I made one stop before getting back on the road.

Last Blast - Let's See Another Capitol!

Indianapolis was my second capitol, but there were no tours the day that I was there.  Since I was in town anyway, I headed over to right the wrong.

What can a tour give you that just wandering around a building on your own can't?  Uh, pretty much everything.  Not only did the guide point out the fossils, but he said that back in the day fossils in stonework were considered to be a bug and not a feature, so getting fossiled stone was a way to reduce costs. 

Speaking of cost saving measures, the budget for the capitol was $2M, and someone was very proud that they came in under budget.

But then the best part of the tour happened.  We were in the treasury office, and I saw a dog bowl next to the water cooler.  I asked about it and learned that Indiana has a Capitol Dog!

Note that Alfred is wearing an Indiana state flag bandana

The story is that Alfred is a trained service dog, and after his owner passed away, he was adopted by her daughter, who works in the treasury office.  His service training makes him suited to office work, and he loves his job.  Of course he has his own Instagram!  Unfortunately he was not at work that day.

If you're keeping track, Alfred is the second Capitol Dog that we've come across in our adventures.  The first was Babydog in West Virginia.

And with that highlight, the trip was officially over.  I headed for the car and five hours later I was home with my own dog.  But that's a story for another day.

Thanks for hanging out with me!  Ever toured a prison?  Read the Little House books as an adult?  Seen one of the Maman sculptures in person?  Stayed at a hotel with a bathroom phone????