Without a Passport

31, August 2010

Harvesting wheat near Paris, Missouri. Nearby is the Union Covered Bridge, one of four remaining covered bridges in Missouri. Photo courtesy of Nancy Bridges.

Rome. Paris. Florence. Japan.
The names may sound exotic, but all can be found right here in Missouri.

After talking to a friend who didn’t seem excited about an upcoming trip to Mexico, St. Louis photographer Nancy Bridges discovered that Missouri is home to a number of towns named after international locales. That conversation led Bridges on a 2,500-mile journey that would take her to all corners of the state and would give her the opportunity to be introduced not only to new places but also to the people who make those places special.

Bridges’s journey now comes to the Missouri History Museum. Without a Passport, an exhibit featuring a selection of the 2,300 photos she took as part of her exploration of rural Missouri, opens September 1 in the Museum’s Bank of America Atrium. In the exhibit, visitors will find a glimpse of a Missouri many of them may not be familiar with.

“I think the biggest thing that I learned, having spent most of my time in St. Louis, was how rural and how agricultural Missouri is,” Bridges said, “and I think that the people living here in the city don’t realize what the agriculture is—at least I didn’t—all the farming that was going on out in these little towns and how the people helped each other out and just what that meant to the economy, that these farms were continuing.”

Jim Kidwell, who runs a chicken and egg operation in Yukon, Missouri. Photo courtesy of Nancy Bridges.

Bridges said she saw both the struggle and the promise that still lives in the small towns of the state. “People are really struggling in these little communities but they seem to continue to have hope and to change with the times,” Bridges said. “Troy, Missouri, if you just drove past on the highway, all you see is Walmart and an auto supply store, but if you follow the signs and you go to the old business area, you discover that there’s still an old opera house there—it’s not in use as an opera house now—but the old hardware store that covers a whole block is still in business after generations. There’s a mattress store and it’s one of the last companies in Missouri that’s making mattresses. So some of these communities have really maintained themselves, some have gone downhill and they’ve brought them back up, some are still, you know, struggling.”

Although none of the places that appear in the Without a Passport exhibit is farther than a day’s drive away, Bridges said many of them might as well be in another country. “I think that a lot of times we get in our cars and we go down Interstate 70 or 55 or 44 and we just keep right on going and we don’t stop to see what’s there,” she said.

She hopes the exhibit will not only give visitors a new perspective of Missouri, but will also give them the inspiration to visit these communities themselves.

—Jody Sowell, Public Historian