Leaving history behind

For more than seven years, Jane Randol Jackson's job has been a labor of love.

In May 2000, Jackson took a part-time position as director of the Cape Girardeau County Archive Center. The newly built center, constructed for just less than $500,000, was needed to protect records that had been piled in every available space. Basement spaces at the county courthouse, the bell towers of the courthouse and the Common Pleas Courthouse in Cape Girardeau, even the old "dungeon" in the Common Pleas Courthouse basement, were crammed with boxes of papers. Some dated to the earliest days of European settlement.

Working evenings -- Jackson was also teaching gifted students in Cape Girardeau Public Schools -- she led the effort to move the documents and begin cataloguing them. She retired from a 34-year teaching career and took over full time at the archive center June 1, 2001.

At the same time, Jackson was handling the volunteer duties of chairing the effort to build and furnish the Red House Interpretive Center in downtown Cape Girardeau.

On Nov. 30, Jackson will step away from both positions. The archive center's thousands of documents are indexed and catalogued for easy use by genealogical researchers, historians and people tracing property records. The Red House has become an anchor for attracting history tourists, and is a little more than one-third of the way to amassing a $100,000 maintenance endowment.

'Absolutely dedicated'

"I feel the job I was hired to do, I have done," Jackson said of the archive center. "It is up and running, and it is accessible to the public. And the state archives have recognized us as the premier county archive in the state."

Jackson explained that, at age 61, she would like to spend more time traveling with her husband and visiting grandchildren.

"I don't want to keep working so long I can't enjoy a retirement," Jackson said.

County officials and historians said her absence will leave a hole that could take several people to fill.

"She has played such a vital role and she is such a great task master," said Dr. Frank Nickell, director of the Center for Regional History at Southeast Missouri State University. "Someone is going to have to pick up a very heavy burden, and we are hoping we can find five or six people to do that."

The quality of the work Jackson has done for the archives is what has impressed Presiding Commissioner Gerald Jones. Whenever he has needed information on the history of the county -- such as when Jones jokingly called for the return of the land "stolen" from Cape Girardeau County to form 28 other counties out to the Kansas line -- Jackson has supplied it.

"We, the county commission, built the building and she build the archive center," Jones said.

Former county clerk Rodney Miller called Jackson to offer her the job as the archive center was being built. "She was absolutely dedicated," Miller said. "She gave more than 100 percent all the time."

'The next level'

The most recent project at the archive center has translated county records written in Spanish from 1790 to 1807 into English. Those records date to the time when Jackson's earliest local ancestor, Enos Randol, received a Spanish land grant in 1797 from Louis Lorimier.

"It is just a pleasure to work here because we are surrounded by Cape Girardeau history," Jackson said.

The archive center averages 250 requests for help and visits each month, ranging from searches of old school records for Social Security purposes to people working on books and magazine articles. Jackson has published her own articles about Cape Girardeau's ties to the Lewis and Clark expedition in "We Proceeded On," the magazine of the Lewis & Clark Heritage Trail Foundation. She recently won election to a one-year term on the foundation's board of directors.

"Now it is time for someone else to take the reins and take it to the next level," Jackson said "I hope to do special projects for the archive center and the Red House; I am just not going to be the person in charge."

The archive center is part of the county clerk's office. Jackson's salary this year is $24,881; the advertisement for the new director will ask applicants to accept a salary of $18,000 to $21,000, clerk Kara Clark said.

"We want to get someone who is qualified," Clark said. "She is not replaceable."

The salary was never the reason she took the job, Jackson said. She could have continued teaching at a much higher rate of pay.

"If you look at archivists around the country, they aren't highly paid people," she said. "In my particular situation, it worked."

rkeller@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 126