One by one, Missouri’s black towns disappear

The corps had been monitoring the situation for days leading up to the breach, and the move was not entirely unexpected. Politicians from Missouri and Illinois were embroiled in highly publicized debate over whether or not to breach the levee, and the state of Missouri took legal action that ultimately proved unsuccessful. The final decision was made that Tuesday afternoon. Just after 10 that night, the explosions shook the region.

The corps maintains that it followed protocol. However, the residents of Pinhook say they were caught off guard and found out about the decision by word of mouth. Tarver said she found out from her brother in New York. She was at work when she got the call. One family was on vacation.

By the time she found out the breach was moving forward, Tarver had only hours to organize her town’s evacuation before the 15-foot wall of water ripped through Pinhook. 

“It took me a year to accept the fact that you couldn’t go home,” Tarver said. As the village chairwoman, she is leading an effort to secure funds to rebuild the town outside of the spillway.

Three years later, the shredded houses remain caked with mud and full of destroyed belongings. Pinhook’s citizens had time to grab only a few things.

“You couldn’t hear a bird, you couldn’t hear a bug,” Tarver recalled from when she returned to her home after the waters receded. “It was silence, as if you had dropped off the face of the earth.”

In the years following the flood, Pinhook’s residents have relocated to nearby cities like Sikeston and East Prairie, but are eager to rebuild and return to country living. Nearly half of their empty homes were destroyed by arson, as was the village’s church. Just a few weeks ago, the house Tarver’s mother and father designed and built by hand was also burned down. Given the remote location of Pinhook, and the fact that it is vacant, there are no leads on a suspect or motive. 

“It was devastating,” Tarver said. “That church represented everything.”

Yet her faith remains unshaken.

“Had we not been rooted and grounded in that church, it would have been much worse,” she said. “When you’re all alone and you have no one or nobody, you look to God.”

It was the economy that ultimately brought about Pennytown’s end. Houston’s family, like many others, moved to nearby Marshall for more opportunity shortly after she was born.

“Pennytown didn’t have anything to offer,” Houston said. “Most worked for the white families around here.”

The Pennytown Freewill Baptist Church is the only building left. It sits on a tiny plot of land bound by a rusted wire fence on three sides. On the other side there’s a pond, farmland and cattle.

Houston’s mother and other ancestors were all baptized in that pond. Cows graze on what was once the road leading to Pennytown. All that’s left now is the empty field, but Houston remembers when it was full of houses where hundreds of people lived. Her uncle and aunt were the last people to live in the village. Their house still stood — on the other side of the fence — for many years after they died, but the new owners of that land tore it down last year. 

It was the airport that destroyed Kinloch. In the 1980s, the city of St. Louis started buying up land to be used for a proposed expansion of Lambert-St. Louis International Airport. Kinloch was to be turned into a runway. Families started moving out, and the city lost more than three-fourths of its population in a decade.

“We had no plans of moving,” said Steven Peebles, who grew up in Kinloch and moved when he was 20. “It was sad, but exciting. Life as I knew it wouldn’t be the same.”

Kinloch would never be the same, either. Despite the airport buyout, no expansion project ever began. In 1980, more than 4,000 lived in Kinloch. Today there are fewer than 300. Almost everything bought by the city has been torn down, and a highway runs over its old cemetery. The official city boundaries have shrunk to less than 1 square mile of land.

“There’s an old African proverb that it takes a village to raise a child. This town was that village,” said Peebles, now 44. “[The airport] took that structure and eradicated it.”

While the buyout, on paper, was voluntary, Peebles recalls those years as being characterized by fear, uncertainty and pressure. Eminent domain was looming in the back of everybody’s mind. His family was one of the last to leave.

But that hasn’t erased a sense of community. Several churches are still functioning and attract the community’s diaspora every week, bringing old neighbors back together. They say Kinloch was once a proud, self-sufficient, family-oriented place to live. 

“It was a self-supporting community,” said Richard B. Riddlespriger, 61, who moved to the area when he was 21. “The things that was needed in the community was already here. It was established.”

Kinloch’s vacant buildings have become a magnet for violence and crime that residents say comes from outside the community. Bodies are occasionally found in the heaps of trash, and some of the old street signs have bullet holes in them.

These days, that’s the St. Louis area’s stereotype of Kinloch. But it’s an image far from what Peebles and others remember of their hometown.

“I really can’t emphasize [too much] how family-oriented Kinloch was,” Peebles said. “It was a community of love.

“The sense of accomplishment will disappear,” he added, “if and when Kinloch disappears.”