“It’s Nice to Have Old Friends:" Group from former Sedgewickville, Mo., school gathers monthly

The first Wednesday of each month, a group of friends who attended school at Sedgewickville School before it consolidated and closed in Sedgewickville, Mo., gather at a different restaurant to eat, talk and remain a part of each others’ lives.

At one particular meeting, 16 of them gather at Sandy’s Place Restaurant outside of Cape Girardeau. They have a photo album with them that tells of the history of Sedgewickville and Sedgewickville School, filled with newspaper clippings and photos some of them are pictured in as children or teenagers. They pass out cards, candy and home-grown nuts and talk about what is happening in their lives in the present day, as well as tell stories from their shared lives in the past.

The friends have been gathering like this once a month since approximately 1980.

Sam Conrad, who graduated from Jackson High School in 1948 after attending Sedgewickville School for 10 years from 1936 to 1946, says he enjoys coming to the lunches because he likes to reminisce with a group that feels like family.

“Sedgewickville is up well 20 miles out from nowhere, just a little Bollinger County town,” Sam Conrad says. “If his family got sick, our family came over and helped them. If somebody couldn’t do something, they called on a neighbor. There was always a neighbor.”

When he grew up in Sedgewickville in the 1930s and 1940s, Sam Conrad recalls the businesses in the town consisted of three grocery stores, two auto body shops, two churches — one Lutheran and one Methodist — two parsonages and two gas pumps, as well as a post office, doctor’s office, flour mill, hotel, feed store, justice of the peace, appliance store, barber shop with shoe repair and Works Progress Administration ( WPA) school. There was one switchboard phone. The town had a population of approximately 100 people, with 19 families living in town and 17 families living in the rural area within a one-mile radius of Sedgewickville.

People walked to church on Sundays together, Sam Conrad says, and the churches alternated play nights on Wednesdays as well as hosting the Fourth of July Picnic in the summer. Farmers grew mostly corn and wheat, and every family had a garden.

“It was just a good, basic-forming community,” Sam Conrad says. “A small town that lived through the Depression, and no one went hungry. Maybe they didn’t eat what they always wanted, but it was good for people helping people.”

Jerry Marshall, who moved from Sedgewickville to St. Charles, Mo., to work for General Motors and then to Bowling Green, Ky., for 20 years for the Corvette line, now lives in Jackson. He says he remembers Sedgewickville as “a booming little town.”

“I was just raised up a couple of miles from there. And I always liked it,” Jerry Marshall says. “I thought it was the best place there was.”

At Sedgewickville School, Sam Conrad says grades 1 through 4 were in one room, and grades 5 through 8 were in a different room. Although the school at one point offered four years of high school, it reduced that offering to two years of high school around 1944 or 1945. Students were then bussed to Patton High School or Jackson High School during their junior and senior years.

Sedgewickville School consolidated in 1967 with Patton School to form Meadow Heights School; Kindergarten through second grades went to the Patton school, and Grades 3 through 6 went to the Sedgewickville school, while the high school students attended Meadow Heights High School. All students, elementary through high school, began attending Meadow Heights School in 1984.

It’s memories like these that the friends enjoy recalling together.

“It’s just so neat to be around a group now that knows our past, parents and people at that time and that age,” says Sue Marshall, who grew up on a farm in Sedgewickville and lived in St. Charles and Bowling Green and now in lives Jackson with her husband Jerry Marshall.

“Whenever we’ve gone to the bigger cities to live, you don’t find that relationship — maybe you have one or two people that know your past or your parents or your aunts and uncles. So, it’s just neat to be able to share the experiences and the times that we’ve been together.”

The friends recognize it’s rare to have friendships that last for decades. Sue Marshall says people can cultivate these types of relationships by visiting each other and writing letters or making telephone calls to each other. Otherwise, she says, the friendship can slip away.

Gladys Conrad, originally from Columbia, Mo., married Sam Conrad two years ago and now regularly attends the lunches. Because the street name and house number where she grew up have changed and none of her childhood neighbors are in the same area anymore, she finds the Sedgwickville group of friends very special.

“The history just didn’t happen [where I grew up]. And I love [that it did here],” Gladys Conrad says. “I just think it is so wonderful to see these people getting together and sharing their history.”

Wanda (Seabaugh) Hale says she has “happy, happy” memories with the people at the table. And they are people she knows she can still depend on.

Hale’s sister, Rosemary (Seabaugh) Berry, who moved to South Carolina, Washington, Georgia, Delaware and Japan after growing up in Sedgewickville, agrees. Their other sister, Sylvia (Seabaugh) Sander also attends the luncheons.

“I think it’s unusual [to have friendships that last this long]. So many of us, we’ve just hung together for so many years,” Rosemary (Seabaugh) Berry says. “[They’re] just people I really enjoy. It’s nice to have old friends. And to keep getting older.”