Because of its oddity, the area south of Columbia was probably destined to become a state park, if not preserved in some other way, although this is hindsight, of course.
There are so many natural phenomena here to excite human curiosity. Flowing creeks disappear underground. Natural shallow ponds called sinkholes act like funnels, holding water for only a short time after heavy rains. Deep holes in the earth open into extensive caverns. Bats boil out of these caves at dusk. There’s a spectacular chasm where a stream emerges from the foot of one cliff only to flow toward another one and beneath a massive arch of limestone topped by trees. This is the centerpiece, the rock bridge that gave the park its name. All are characteristics of a karst landscape underlain by porous and water-soluble limestone.
• Oliver Schuchard
The first recorded owner of this curious landscape was Nathan Glasgow, who bought it from the federal government for $1.25 per acre before Missouri became a state in 1820. Stone quarried from a flanking bluff was used to build a low dam across the upstream end of the natural bridge, thus enhancing the power of the water to operate a gristmill. This was the first of a succession of mills at the site over the next century. A paper mill operated in the 1830s but didn’t last long. It was followed by a whiskey distillery built by James McConathy, who marketed his product as McConathy’s Rye, touting its quality derived from the pure water of Little Bonne Femme Creek (now Devil’s Icebox Spring Branch).
The distillery was raided by Union soldiers in 1863 and destroyed by fire in 1889, but it was rebuilt two years later by a new owner and continued to prosper until the Missouri legislature passed a local-option liquor law. In 1908 Boone County declined to vote itself wet, and the distillery fell into ruin. In the late nineteenth century, there were at times both a general store and a post office at the little town of Rock Bridge Mills. It was an active community center, a place for political rallies, celebrations, and family picnics, and gatherings continued even after the old distillery shut down and the store closed. The geologic wonders were an enduring attraction.
Jess and Mary Calkins came from Nebraska in 1922 to buy the Rock Bridge and 860 adjoining acres. The Calkinses opened a “gay, modern amusement park,” according to an announcement in the Columbia Evening Missourian of July 23, 1922. It offered “a merry-go-round, doll racks, popcorn, and fairy floss candy machines’’ and also “elaborate fireworks in the evening.” They soon added a dance floor, built beneath the branches of an ancient oak, and it became a popular attraction.
When the Calkinses’ daughter Naomi married Columbian Dennis Ingrum, the newlyweds received as a wedding gift a deed to the Rock Bridge and 320 acres. In all the years that Dennis Ingrum farmed the land, he always made visitors from town feel welcome, sometimes entertaining the “city girls” from Stephens College with a demonstration of making molasses from sorghum cane. A field trip to Rock Bridge and Devil’s Icebox was standard for geology classes, and university students would return with their dates for a lark. “Dad always wanted to share the beauty of the place with others who loved it, too. He wasn’t interested in getting rich,” daughter Mary Toalson told a reporter, explaining why Dennis Ingrum rejected big offers from developers but agreed to sell his land at a modest price for a state park.
Although always privately owned, the actual rock bridge and its neighboring caves had been a semipublic area for more than a century when in 1961, sudden tragedy struck a Columbia family, starting a movement to preserve the area permanently for public use. That is why the word “memorial” appears in the official park name. Lewis Stoerker was a popular professor of speech and dramatic arts at the University of Missouri when his daughter Carol, age nine, was struck and killed by a car. Grief-stricken, Stoerker and his wife Dorothy conceived the idea of establishing a park to memorialize their beloved Carol, a place where children could run and play in safety. He knew about Rock Bridge and approached landowners in the area. Dennis Ingrum quickly said he would sell—for a park.
A VITAL WILD: Devil’s Icebox is the seventh longest cave in Missouri, nearly seven miles including side passages. In a state with nearly seven thousand known caves, Devil’s Icebox ranks among the most diverse caves. It harbors three federally endangered species of bats and boasts a atworm, the pink planarian, not known to be anywhere else in the world. The cave has been closed to visitors since 2010, because of the threat of whitenose syndrome to bats. Wild cave tours, formerly oared by trained park staff and volunteers on a limited basis, were suspended indefinitely until more is understood about the disease.
The Stoerkers and their daughter had many friends, young and old, who rallied to the cause. They held auctions, teenagers collected money, 4-H clubs and scout troops helped, and Columbia businesses made gifts. At one point, Dr. Frederick Middlebush, a former president of the University of Missouri, handed Professor Stoerker a check for $10,000. By 1966 the fund exceeded $85,000, and a committee went to see the State Park Board. The board agreed to accept the proposed park provided the citizens group could raise a total of $175,000 to match another $175,000 the board would seek from the recently enacted federal Land and Water Conservation Fund to acquire the needed land.
Although such arrangements rarely work out exactly as planned, the Rock Bridge Memorial Park Association donated more than 1,100 acres to the state during 1967 and 1968, and the state purchased several hundred acres more.
Public use of the area increased after the initial acquisitions were completed and the state park became official. On April 10, 1974, at a celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the state park system, Gov. Christopher Bond dedicated a stone monument and plaque at the park in “appreciation to the Rock Bridge Memorial Park Association, Inc., and the Columbia community” and “in memory of Carol Stoerker.” Piece by piece, the park was expanded until by 2000 it totaled more than 2,270 acres.
Next to the famous bridge itself and only a short distance from it, the outstanding geologic feature of the park is a precipitous entrance to a steep, rocky chasm known as the Devil’s Icebox. A boardwalk now leads to the Icebox—a sinkhole that collapsed into a cave—and then descends into it by sturdy plank steps installed by the park division to prevent damage to the fragile plant life that clings to the rock walls. At the bottom is an entrance into the cave system, and in midsummer, one perceives at once how the Icebox got its name. The cave stream runs by, accompanied by a steady flow of chilling air. Explorers in 1926 and later determined that the cave extended three and a half miles along its main channel, and it has lengthy side passages for a total length of nearly seven miles, making it the seventh-longest cave in Missouri.
While protecting caves for bat habitat was probably not what motivated park founders, they nevertheless accomplished it. Devil’s Icebox Cave is used by a maternity colony of endangered gray bats for raising their young each year from April through August. Other species that hibernate in the cave are the big and little brown bats, the tri-colored bat, and the endangered Indiana and northern long-eared bats. A small flatworm, the pink planarian, has been found only here in the entire world. The pink planarian and other troglobites of the cave—including a spider, a millipede, and a springtail—lack eyes and complete their life cycles living solely in caves. Along with surface species that accidentally find their way into the cave, the animal life of the Icebox ranks among the most diverse of any Missouri cave.
The stream that issues from Devil’s Icebox is visible for only a few feet before it again flows underground through Connor’s Cave, only about 150 feet in length, then emerges as a spring that flows through a valley created by the collapse of a section of cave roof—the event that separated the Rock Bridge from the rest of the cave system. If these karst features seem complex, a visit to the boardwalk with its explanatory panels will make them more clear. While subject to change, Connor’s Cave is open from April 13 through October 13, and is often used for school tours and bat programs.
The surface watershed that recharges the Devil’s Icebox stream is dotted with hundreds of sinkholes, funnel-shaped depressions that drain water directly into the cave system. Through dye-tracing studies, park officials have learned that Bonne Femme Creek also loses water to the underground cave system, bringing the total acreage in the watershed to more than 8,500 acres. To protect the stream and its cave life from pollution by agricultural chemicals, lawn fertilizers, or human wastes draining into these sinkholes, the state was able to acquire nearby parcels of the watershed on several occasions since 1975. These tracts of “sinkhole plain” make up the areas where the Grassland, Karst, and other trails run. Native grassland, interesting in itself for its wildf lowers and bird life, has been restored on parts of these tracts. Water quality in the cave, where the pink planarian lives, continues to be a concern as lands around the park are developed.
To help protect Gans Creek, a tributary of Little Bonne Femme Creek f lowing through the park from the east, 750 acres of bottomland forest, limestone bluffs, and wooded hills have been designated the Gans Creek Wild Area. Gans Creek, along with Devil’s Icebox Spring Branch and nearby Bonne Femme, Bass, and Turkey Creeks, is an Outstanding State Resource Water. The wild area is an excellent place for hiking, birding, botanizing, or even cross-country skiing during winter snows. When the City of Columbia acquired 320 acres along Gans Creek directly east of the wild area for its park system, conservation and civic groups participated enthusiastically in the planning process from 2007 to 2010 to ensure that the watershed in the hills along the creek would be preserved in a natural condition to protect the creek and the state park.
Rock Bridge State Park attracts more than 300,000 visitors a year, including many school groups who learn about caves, bats, karst systems, and water quality. It has day-use areas with two picnic shelters and other picnic sites, a playground, and a log cabin of uncertain origin—the Hickam Cabin—that was dismantled and rebuilt in 2014 by the park’s support organization, Friends of Rock Bridge. Here and there in the park are sites of other cabins or barns. The park offers a special-use area for nonprofit youth groups interested in primitive camping. Eight hiking trails totaling some twenty-two miles provide access to all areas of the park, with some available also for mountain biking and horse riding when conditions permit.
The Friends of Rock Bridge was organized in 1991 to help protect the park from inappropriate or high-density development on its borders and to encourage the use of the park for recreation and education. The organization developed a vision early on for a nature discovery center, with classrooms and exhibits to serve as a base for groups visiting the park, but for various reasons was unable to realize it. Then in 2013, officials of Missouri State Parks and Columbia Public Schools jointly announced plans for an innovative partnership to build a new experimental elementary school in the park rooted in nature and science education. The school would house one hundred fifth graders selected by lottery, who would be immersed in nature-themed education, both indoors and outdoors, across the curriculum. The facility would be available for other groups or park events during nonschool hours.
To an extent that early visitors to the Icebox and even citizens who contributed their dollars for the park in the 1960s could scarcely have imagined, Columbia has sprawled southward in recent decades and now borders the park on parts of its north, east, and west boundaries. Developers in 2013 proposed a Parkside Estates subdivision adjacent to the northwest corner of the park that state park officials regarded as the most dense development directly adjacent to a state park anywhere in the state. Although that density would not have been permitted under either the tract’s former county zoning or the provisions of the painstakingly crafted and approved plan for the Bonne Femme Watershed of which it is a part, the proposal was approved by the Columbia City Council subject to a limit of no more than 15 percent impervious surface and other provisions such as use of native vegetation, no chemical fertilizers, and measures to limit runoff. This is a chance—and a challenge—for city officials and Columbia citizens, who almost universally love Rock Bridge Park, to show that such a development can be successful over time without harming the park.
Despite the challenges of accommodating a growing regional population, Rock Bridge remains a delightful destination. Its landscape of entrenched creek valleys, massive limestone bluffs and caves, and rolling grassy uplands intrigues and charms, especially if you are on foot. Countless fond memories of this park derive from springtime visits by students from the nearby universities; something powerful draws young people when the air softens, wildflowers blossom, and birds call from greening woodlands. It could also be a good time for you and your family to make memories of your own. Try a picnic near the natural bridge followed by exploration of nearby trails. Listen for spring peepers, watch for Virginia bluebells, and catch the fragrance of wild plum.
ROCK BRIDGE MEMORIAL STATE PARK • 5901 SOUTH HIGHWAY 163, COLUMBIA
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