Lonnie Johnson performing in 1965 at the Folk Festival Show, Palisades Amusement Park, New Jersey. [Cornell University Library, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Amsterdam News Photograph Archive, #8084]

Alonzo “Lonnie” Johnson was an extraordinarily gifted blues guitarist and talented singer who pioneered a…

Jolly Mill circa 2022. [Photo by Ross Brown]

Jolly Mill, a grist mill and whiskey distillery, was built in the late 1840s on Capps Creek in…

Scott Joplin. [New York Public Library, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, 1692841]

Known during his lifetime as the “King of Ragtime Writers,” Scott Joplin was an African…

William T. Kemper in 1902. [Political History of Jackson County: Biographical Sketches of the Men Who Have Helped to Make It (1902)]

Progenitor of two of Missouri’s most prominent banking families, William T. Kemper also…

Nathaniel N. Kinney. [State Historical Society of Missouri, Rolla Research Center, William L. Vandeventer Papers (R1428)]

Nathaniel “Nat” N. Kinney has a popular image as a romantic, violent, swashbuckling…

Arnold Krekel. [State Historical Society of Missouri, Mit Feder und Hammer! The German Experience in St. Louis Records, S0941-079]

Arnold Krekel, who served from 1865 to 1888 as a US judge for the Western District of…

The Figure 8 roller coaster at Lakeside Park, added in 1907, was a “huge reversing spiral” in which cars rushed down a half-mile curving track with “three figure eights in a descent of 50 feet.” [Courtesy of the Joplin Historical & Mineral Museum]

 “Once the most important and popular play place of the Tri-State district,” Lakeside Park in Jasper…

Albert Bond Lambert with Orville Wright in St. Louis, circa 1910. [Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis, Photographs and Prints Collection, P0059-00002]

Important in the history of business in Missouri, Albert Bond Lambert made even larger…

The Lemp Brewery bottling plant at Cherokee Street and Carondelet Avenue

The Lemp Brewery in St. Louis was established by Johann Adam Lemp in the early…

Theodore Link, circa 1890. [Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis, Photographs and Prints Collection, N27617]

Theodore Carl Link is best known as the architect of St. Louis’s Union Station, but if he…