Cape Girardeau has rich restaurant history

Good food, served up fast, at a decent price -- Cape Girardeau has long been the regional restaurant destination for this area. No less at the turn of the last century than now.

Main Street offered hungry diners several choices in the 1890s -- The St. Charles Hotel, Shivelbine's Saloon, Abe Byas' restaurant -- but Scott's Lightning Restaurant was favored and regularly promoted by The Cape Girardeau Democrat newspaper's editor, Ben Adams.

It is not known when the Scotts opened their restaurant, but in August 1891, Louis Houck announced plans to tear down two buildings he owned facing Independence street. Butchers Lipp & Son sold fresh meat from one building and a restaurant, owned and operated by M.A. (Manuel Alexander) and Martha Scott, operated from the second. Census records indicate M.A. was born in 1851 in Bollinger County, and Martha in Tennessee; both were likely enslaved before Emancipation. The Black couple lived in Cape Girardeau as early as 1876, but little more is known of their back story. Scott's first occupation on census records was hotel porter, likely the at the Aquamsi Hotel on Water Street.

I find it interesting to see who lived as near neighbors revealed in census records and glimpse everyday social interactions. Cape Girardeau's neighborhoods of the era were well integrated. The Scotts' neighbors in 1876 and 1880 were the white families of John Lindemann (a soda water manufacturer) and George Hirsch (a dry goods merchant) and the Black families of Abram and Eliza Byas (also restaurant operators), and Jesse and Nancy Williams.

When Houck completed his new two-story building at 22 Main St., M.A. Scott leased it to expand his business to also operate Hotel Scott. Open for business in March 1892, the CG Democrat write-up said it was not a large hotel (eight rooms), but it was the most modern of the city -- furnished in as elegant style as any first-class hotel: rooms lighted with electric lights, heated with hot air and a bath room where guests could bathe in cold or warm water!

The small hotel was a regular draw for river and rail travelers, but the Scotts were best known for their restaurant. The lunch counter and dining room were popular with a wide patronage of white customers, including priests and seminarians at St. Vincent's College. Scott was known for excellent food and service by "all who traveled the Mississippi River."

Adams, the newspaper editor, was undoubtedly a fan. Local news columns regularly reported Scott's procurement of fresh potatoes, green beans, tomatoes, celery and his own steamboat trips to fresh fish markets, returning with black bass, red snapper, crappie, trout, mackerel and fresh oysters.

Scott was known to deliver the editor occasional fresh-churned buckets of ice cream -- resulting in free advertisement.

I have noted a sense how routine the Scotts' Black-owned business seemed amid the multitude of businesses and commerce of Cape Girardeau in the 1900s -- accepted, recommended and patronized by many. It would be shortsighted to gloss over the unspoken obstacles a Black business owner faced in the first decades of freedom, and though those hardships are not paraded in the majority culture newspapers, it is almost certain the Scotts met but persevered through discrimination. The Scotts produced a good product and provided jobs for the Black community as waiters, hotel maids and cooks, contributing to their uplift. It is also somewhat ironic that the Scotts' 1892 lunch counter, turned no one away. Our region would experience segregation of lunch counters dynamics 50 years later.

Relentless demands of a 24/7 business took a toll on Scott's health. He suffered a light stroke in 1915, and a few months later, "dropped dead in the hall of the hotel," at the age of 68. Harmony Lodge No. 40, of which he was a member, had charge of his funeral at St. James A.M.E. Church. Mr. Scott is buried at Fairmount Cemetery.

Martha sold the restaurant to Chris Freeman just a few weeks later and left Cape Girardeau to join her son in Minneapolis for a time. Freeman continued the lease of Houck's property, renovating and reopening his restaurant as the Crescent Lunch Room. Twelve years later, the community happily received Martha on a return visit to Cape, reunited with long-time friends, as recounted in a 1928 St. Louis Argus article. Martha lived the rest of her life with a niece in Biggers, Arkansas.

Sharon Sanders helped locate a 1958 Southeast Missourian article which announced the razing of a century-old building in the 100 block of Independence. Apparently, the building was not demolished in 1891, as Houck originally announced! It was noted the building once housed the Scott's [Lightning] Restaurant and the Aquamsi Hotel. As the building became rubble, the journalist reminded old timers of bygone days, toting one more time Scott's Restaurant and commending the memory of the Scotts for their exceptional service to the community.