Completed Projects

Moline History Echoes From Riverside Cemetery
Click here to go to the web page about this completed book.

When Farmers Were Heroes: The Era of National Corn Husking Contests
Click here to go to the web page about this completed documentary.

Current Projects

The Rock Island Confederate Prison: The Andersonville of the North?

The winter of 1863-64 was very cold in the Midwest, temperatures reaching as low as 32 degrees below zero Fahrenheit at Rock Island. During December of 1863, about 5000 Confederate prisoners were brought on dreadfully long train rides to a new, and ill-prepared, prison camp on Rock Island. Over the following twenty months the camp housed over 12,000 prisoners of war from the South of whom almost 2000 would perish there. A severe winter and a cholera epidemic caused hundreds of prisoner deaths in its first months. However, its overall death rate was much lower than the rate at Andersonville. Today, the remains of 1950 of those prisoners are buried at the Confederate Cemetery on Rock Island and thousands visit the cemetery annually. 

 

Heritage Documentaries, Inc. has received initial funding to begin the production of a 27-minute video documentary on DVD that will tell the story of the Rock Island Confederate prison. It will highlight the reasons for the choice of this location for the camp, the lack of adequate facilities when the first prisoners arrived, the eventual development of facilities, the administration of the camp, the establishment of the cemetery, and the closing of the camp and dispersal of prisoners. 

Special emphasis in the documentary will be placed on everyday life in the camp and the stories of the people involved. Although prisoners had a few privileges, including access to reading material, their general circumstances were not pleasant. Their plight will be captured through the use of stark photographs and other images, plus diaries and letters written by prisoners. Decisions made by officers affecting the treatment of the prisoners—some positive, some inhumane —will be chronicled. The actions of various groups of prison guards, including former African American slaves from the South and older members of the “Greybeards,” will be highlighted. Fears held by community members in Rock Island, Moline, and Davenport, as well as their contributions to the welfare of prisoners, will also be featured. Narrators will portray prisoners, officers, and guards to provide first-person viewpoints on life in the camp.

 



Projects We Are Considering

Charles Edward Russell, Midwestern Roots, National Influence: 
Russell, who grew up in Davenport, Iowa, was a muck-raking journalist, editor, and member of the Socialist Party who turned down the Party’s presidential nomination in 1916. He wrote several books, including one on the Mississippi River, won a Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1928, and was a co-founder of the NAACP in 1909. His father, about whom Charles wrote a biography, was a staunch abolitionist and an influential editor of the Davenport newspaper in the mid-nineteenth century.  See:  A Pioneer Editor in Early Iowa: a Sketch of the Life of Edward Russell (1941) and A Rafting on the Mississip’  (1929) both by Charles Edward Russell; and The Pen is Mightier: The Muckraking Life of Charles Edward Russell (2003) by Robert Miraldi.  

Controlling the River, Changing the River: Locks and Dams on the Upper Mississippi: 
After more than fifty years of early navigation enhancements, the current nine-foot channel system was constructed in the 1930s, and the first of the locks to be completed was at Rock Island.  A major debate today, about the future of the system, pits environmental versus commercial interests.  The 75th anniversary of Lock 15 at Rock Island is coming in 2009.

A River of Logs: 
In the latter two-thirds of the nineteenth century, vast pine forests in Minnesota and Wisconsin were cut down.  First lumber, than logs were floated down the Mississippi River.  At mid-century, Moline, Rock Island, Davenport, Clinton and other towns become major milling centers, shipping lumber by rail to build the Midwest and Great Plains.  Fortunes were made, including those of Weyerhauser, Denkman, Dimmock, and Gould.  A central character in the story is Stephen Hanks, a cousin of Abraham Lincoln.  Early nineteenth century logs were milled into lumber in Wisconsin. In 1844 Hanks, of Albany, Ill., assembled the first log raft and thereby transformed the process; thereafter logs were floated down the river.  Then in 1914, in a dramatic closing to the log raft era, Hanks rode the last of these rafts to float on the Upper Mississippi

Antoine LeClaire: 
This colorful and influential Davenport man was part French-Canadian and part Native American.  Speaking numerous languages and dialects, he played important roles in mediating between Native Americans and Europeans in the early nineteenth century.  He also helped establish the town of Davenport and provided land and a depot for the first railroad in Iowa in 1855.  

Zebulon Montgomery Pike, Explorer of the Upper Mississippi River: 
Pike’s exploration of the Mississippi, beginning in 1805, was overshadowed by the Lewis and Clark’s expedition up the Missouri.  Although the reviews of Pike’s accomplishments are mixed, he did established the location of three important American forts on the Mississippi, Fort Armstrong (Rock Island), Fort Crawford (Prairie du Chien), and Fort Snelling (Minneapolis).  Pike’s name is one of the most recognizable in the United States because of the peak in Colorado that bears his name, a place that he probably never visited. See:
http://www.nps.gov/archive/jeff/lewisclark2/circa1804/WestwardExpansion/EarlyExplorers/ZebulonPike.htm

Midwestern Origins of the National Basketball Association:  
Early professional basketball in the United States involved barnstorming teams, teams sponsored by prominent corporations, and a variety of leagues, from the 1920s through the 1940s.  Eventually, in 1950, the two most prominent leagues of the time merged to become the NBA.  Among the teams that played in the 1940s were several located in small Midwestern markets, including Sheboygan, Wisconsin, Waterloo, Iowa,  Fort Wayne, Indiana, and the Tri Cities of Iowa and Illinois (which played their games in Moline, IL).   By the mid 1950s these and most other small-market teams had either folded or moved to larger markets, making the NBA a big city league. Today, the memories of big-time basketball in these small places is indelibly etched in both their local histories and in NBA lore.   This documentary will utilize film, written works, and interviews with former players, coaches, and fans to tell this story of Midwestern towns that were in the big leagues.