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Bob Priddy,

immediate past president of the State Historical Society of Missouri, explains how the county’s bicentennial is an opportunity to walk backward into the future.

The Maori people of New Zealand have something in common with Cole Countians celebrating the county’s bicentennial. The Maori have an ancient proverb: Ka mua, Ka muri which translates into “walking backward into the future.”

That is what our county bicentennial is about — walking into a future we cannot see while looking back on the historic and the familiar things that shaped the present, knowing we have changed as a people during this journey and our descendants will be different from us.

Some who do not understand how different we are fear who our next generations will be and out of that fear will make futile efforts to confine that future to present, or even past, standards. But we cannot stop time, and those who gather to celebrate Cole County’s TRI centennial will be different in appearance, social relationships, political references and in a multitude of other ways we cannot anticipate no matter how hard we might resist.

We are honoring those first Tennessee Baptist settlers of Howard’s Bluff, the area that became Marion, our first county seat, and the first settlers of the area that became the second county seat, but the historical record shows how different from us they were. We know the names of the men, but it is harder to learn the names of their wives and impossible to learn the names of the slaves they brought with them. We know they were people of hope, of ambition and hard work, qualities necessary to survive in a world where fire was an essential ingredient of life. We live in a world where fire is a disaster at worst and a mostly decorative feature of a modern living room at best. In our world, our homes and even the furniture in them are not products of our own hands. We travel farther in an hour than they sometimes traveled in a week, more in a day than some of them traveled in their lives.

They were not the first Cole Countians. In nearby Montgomery County’s Graham Cave State Park, evidence has been found of human habitation in Mid-Missouri 10,000 years ago, long before the Osage populated Cole and other counties — and other sites in Missouri date back further than that.

An 1889 Cole County history says there were “several hundred” ancient burial mounds here when the first white settlers arrived, “not less than fifty of them” between Jefferson City and the Osage River. Only a few remain. The 1840 Capitol (the one that burned in 1911) was built atop one of those mounds that contained “a great number of bones and pieces of pottery.”

We observe 200 years in a place inhabited for thousands of years. We should honor the memories of the ancient ones, too.

We celebrate the bicentennial of man-made boundaries that define where we are and a history that tells us who we have become. While we might be walking backward into the future, it is possible for us to turn and face that future, respectful of the past but unafraid of the changes that our descendants will make because they must remain, as were the people of Cole County 200 years ago, people of hope.

Bob Priddy is the retired news director of The Missourinet and immediate past president of the State Historical Society of Missouri. He also writes for bobpriddy.net.

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2020-11-06T08:00:00.0000000Z

2020-11-06T08:00:00.0000000Z

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