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We want to congratulate AC Staff Member Michael Comer for thirty-two years of service with the Missouri Department of Natural Resources. Mike, we are extremely proud to have you as a member of our staff and I am honored to have served with you in the field over the years. Folks, THIS is what a dedicated living historian looks like. This article is an excellent tribute to a true treasure to the AC Community. CONGRATULATIONS!
New Madrid Resident Found His Niche Sharing History
From the Sikeston Standard Democrat
January 26, 2018 4:18 PM
NEW MADRID, Mo. - There wasn’t much room in Mike Comer’s office in the building just across the road from the Hunter-Dawson State Historic Site. Boxes filled with history books and biographies sat in front of his desk while other boxes waited to be packed with memorabilia and honors from his years of working for the Department of Natural Resources.
On Feb. 1, Comer will leave that office as he retires, ending his career just five days short of exactly 32 years.
Comer said his job with DNR began by accident. Having earned his master’s degree in history, he was looking for employment when he came across a position for historic site administrator.
“I said that is me, that is what I want to do,” he recalled.
Comer began his career with the state of Missouri working at the General John J. Pershing Boyhood Home in Laclede. After a year he transferred to the Confederate Memorial State Historic Site in Higginsville where he worked four years before spending the next seven years at Dillard Mill State Historic Site near Viburnum.
For the past 20 years he has worked at the Hunter-Dawson State Historic Site in New Madrid. His job as natural resource manager also includes managing Big Oak Tree State Park and Towosaghy State Historic Site in Mississippi County and the Morris State Park between Malden and Campbell. In addition, he oversees the care of the Battle of Belmont marker at the end of Highway 80 in Mississippi County.
Directing four diverse sites over a 50-mile radius is a challenge, Comer said.
“Morris and Big Oak are natural history and (Hunter-Dawson) and Towosaghy are cultural history. So they are different facilities that need to be managed from different perspectives,” he said. “By education and training I’m a historian, not a naturalist. But I have learned a lot about natural history and how those eco-systems work and what needs to be done to keep them working right.”
There are the obvious duties such as ensuring the sites are maintained and the grass is mowed. Then there are the minute details including a detailed study of the interior layers of paint and paper to develop the original color scheme used by Amanda Hunter when the ante-bellum home was built.
Comer and his staff have faced the results of the high winds blown into the Bootheel by Hurricane Ike and of the ice storm of 2009. Then there was the decision by the Corps of Engineers to breach the levee during the flood of 2011.
After the levee was blown up, the Mississippi River swept through the two Mississippi County sites. When the waters finally ebbed, the infrastructure at Big Oak Tree State Park was destroyed and some areas contained sand deposits measuring four to five-feet high while Towosaghy’s signage was damaged beyond repair and has yet to be replaced.
The sites’ histories differ, too.
“I have done programs on the Civil War, the Hunter-Dawson House, the Mississippian people and how they lived. All completely different subjects so you have to try to be as well-versed in as you can,” he said.
He compares his job to running a business.
“When people ask me what I do I say I’m very much like a small business owner. We have budgets, we have maintenance, we have equipment, we have personnel, we have bills to pay. we have bank accounts to manage,” Comer said. “There is so much more to it than giving tours of a house.”
But unlike a business owner, Comer’s budget request must be approved by the state.
He said the Missouri Department of Natural Resources is fortunate to benefit from the one-half of 1 percent sales tax. It helps provide state parks with a steady source of income.
“But because we are part of a large system, everybody needs funds to do their mission. So sometimes it is kind of tough. You may have to do something differently or perhaps not get the piece of equipment that you need and make (the old one) last another year or two because the resources are limited,” he said. “That can always be a challenge and not just for me, it is for every facility in the system and for Jefferson City: How to make the dollars go the farthest to accomplish the most and take care of these places for the people of Missouri.”
His work at the Hunter-Dawson has included expanding the house’s collection of Mitchell-Rammelsberg furniture with the addition of a complete banquet table for the family dining room. Comer said the house contains one of the largest, if not the largest collection of Mitchell-Rammelsberg furniture in the nation.
He was also pleased when Amanda Hunter’s sewing machine, which had disappeared from the house while it was unoccupied in the 1960s, was returned. According to family history, Hunter had expressed her Southern sympathies inside the sewing machine cabinet.
“I pulled the drawer out of that sewing machine and it is written right there: ’Hurrah for Jeff Davis.’ So that was really neat because it corroborated the oral history we had always heard,” he said. “It also says ‘Hurrah for Stonewall.’ That was a pretty cool thing to have come back.”
But Comer said under his tenure he wanted the house tours to focus less on objects and more on the time and people. Acquiring smaller objects, Comer and his staff tried to give the appearance the home was lived in.
“We tried to make the house, so when people looked in a room, it kind of helped the interpretation . . . A chair is a chair, people can figure that out. What I wanted to change our tours more to was the time period. How people lived. How it compares to us today. To try to draw parallels and contrasts between modern life and life in the 1860s - which wasn’t that much different really. People are people no matter when they live.”
He said he has encouraged the sites’ interpreters to learn as much about the time period as they can. This way, he said, they can answer visitors questions on any number of things from how food was prepared to slavery and yes, even furniture.
The tours are well received.
“We get a lot of people that say it is the best house tour they have ever had in their life and this is from people that go to a lot of historic homes,” Comer said. “So I think we have a very good product here to present to the public.”
Annually, the sites draw both locals and visitors from across the country. The figures for 2016 show 34,998 individuals came to Big Oak Tree State Park and 14,863 were at Morris State Park while there were 4,825 visitors to the Hunter-Dawson State Historic Site and 2,796 at Towosahgy.
But Comer emphasized numbers don’t always tell the full story. He explained that while Big Oak Tree State Park may have a much higher rate of visitors those visitors are on their own.
At the Hunter-Dawson Home, visitors have one-on-one interaction with the staff as they take the hour-long tour through the house.
It isn’t just about drawing tourists. Comer said he has sought to host activities at the site which bring in local residents as well.
“I think when you have an historic site like this that is well established and has been here a long time, that one of the things that happens is local folks think, ‘Well I have been to Hunter-Dawson, I don’t need to go back.’ We want them to come back. We want them to enjoy the facility because it is here in their neighborhood,” Comer said.
For area residents he and his staff host the popular candlelight tours at Christmas and an Easter egg hunt in the spring. Also over the years, Comer has organized and presented a Civil War Bootcamp to introduce youngsters to life as a Civil War soldier.
He is especially proud of the three re-enactments he organized to show what it would have been like in New Madrid when Confederates held the community along with the occupation by Federal troops following the fall of Island No. 10. Comer said the events drew many of the country’s top-notch re-enactors, who provided an accurate view of life during the Civil War.
Working with Comer to maintain the parks are Vicki Jackson, interpretative resource specialist, and Jeff Williamson, park maintenance worker in New Madrid, and Chadd Thomas, the park maintenance worker at Big Oak. They are assisted by seasonal employees as well.
Jackson said Comer’s departure will leave a big hole to fill.
“I have enjoyed working with Mike for the last 15 years,” Jackson said. “He has a lot of knowledge about the site, the Civil War, and the Victorian time period.”
According to Jackson, Comer was always willing to share what he knew about the site’s history and working with the public.
“I learned the importance of using people and not furniture as a focus in the tours,” she explained. “To talk about the people who lived there and the time period and to make it a personal experience for each person by focusing on what they find interesting.”
While Comer isn’t sure who or when his replacement will be named, he knows he will have plenty to do as a retiree. He intends to grow his hobby into business.
“I plan on keeping busy, I’m not going to vegetate,” Comer said. “ Gun smithing is something I have been wanting to do for quite a while. I’m looking forward to devoting more time to it.”
There will be more time for family. He and his wife, Diana, who is a nurse at New Madrid Elementary School, plan to remain in the New Madrid area. The couple have six children and nine grandchildren, all boys.
“I have a baseball team or a basketball team with a four-man bench,” Comer said with a grin.
According to Comer, it is time to move on but he is glad he found that job posting more than three decades ago.
“I often think, I could have made more money doing this or doing that but when I look back at it I just really can’t imagine doing anything else but this,” he said. “I think it was really my niche, where I fit in.
“ My goal has always been to educate people on their history when they come to one of my facilities. So they walk away with a better understanding with where they come from because we all come from our history,” he continued. “I would like to think I did a pretty good job at that.”
CLICK HERE FOR THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE AT THE SIKESTON STANDARD DEMOCRAT
New Madrid Resident Found His Niche Sharing History
From the Sikeston Standard Democrat
January 26, 2018 4:18 PM
NEW MADRID, Mo. - There wasn’t much room in Mike Comer’s office in the building just across the road from the Hunter-Dawson State Historic Site. Boxes filled with history books and biographies sat in front of his desk while other boxes waited to be packed with memorabilia and honors from his years of working for the Department of Natural Resources.
On Feb. 1, Comer will leave that office as he retires, ending his career just five days short of exactly 32 years.
Comer said his job with DNR began by accident. Having earned his master’s degree in history, he was looking for employment when he came across a position for historic site administrator.
“I said that is me, that is what I want to do,” he recalled.
Comer began his career with the state of Missouri working at the General John J. Pershing Boyhood Home in Laclede. After a year he transferred to the Confederate Memorial State Historic Site in Higginsville where he worked four years before spending the next seven years at Dillard Mill State Historic Site near Viburnum.
For the past 20 years he has worked at the Hunter-Dawson State Historic Site in New Madrid. His job as natural resource manager also includes managing Big Oak Tree State Park and Towosaghy State Historic Site in Mississippi County and the Morris State Park between Malden and Campbell. In addition, he oversees the care of the Battle of Belmont marker at the end of Highway 80 in Mississippi County.
Directing four diverse sites over a 50-mile radius is a challenge, Comer said.
“Morris and Big Oak are natural history and (Hunter-Dawson) and Towosaghy are cultural history. So they are different facilities that need to be managed from different perspectives,” he said. “By education and training I’m a historian, not a naturalist. But I have learned a lot about natural history and how those eco-systems work and what needs to be done to keep them working right.”
There are the obvious duties such as ensuring the sites are maintained and the grass is mowed. Then there are the minute details including a detailed study of the interior layers of paint and paper to develop the original color scheme used by Amanda Hunter when the ante-bellum home was built.
Comer and his staff have faced the results of the high winds blown into the Bootheel by Hurricane Ike and of the ice storm of 2009. Then there was the decision by the Corps of Engineers to breach the levee during the flood of 2011.
After the levee was blown up, the Mississippi River swept through the two Mississippi County sites. When the waters finally ebbed, the infrastructure at Big Oak Tree State Park was destroyed and some areas contained sand deposits measuring four to five-feet high while Towosaghy’s signage was damaged beyond repair and has yet to be replaced.
The sites’ histories differ, too.
“I have done programs on the Civil War, the Hunter-Dawson House, the Mississippian people and how they lived. All completely different subjects so you have to try to be as well-versed in as you can,” he said.
He compares his job to running a business.
“When people ask me what I do I say I’m very much like a small business owner. We have budgets, we have maintenance, we have equipment, we have personnel, we have bills to pay. we have bank accounts to manage,” Comer said. “There is so much more to it than giving tours of a house.”
But unlike a business owner, Comer’s budget request must be approved by the state.
He said the Missouri Department of Natural Resources is fortunate to benefit from the one-half of 1 percent sales tax. It helps provide state parks with a steady source of income.
“But because we are part of a large system, everybody needs funds to do their mission. So sometimes it is kind of tough. You may have to do something differently or perhaps not get the piece of equipment that you need and make (the old one) last another year or two because the resources are limited,” he said. “That can always be a challenge and not just for me, it is for every facility in the system and for Jefferson City: How to make the dollars go the farthest to accomplish the most and take care of these places for the people of Missouri.”
His work at the Hunter-Dawson has included expanding the house’s collection of Mitchell-Rammelsberg furniture with the addition of a complete banquet table for the family dining room. Comer said the house contains one of the largest, if not the largest collection of Mitchell-Rammelsberg furniture in the nation.
He was also pleased when Amanda Hunter’s sewing machine, which had disappeared from the house while it was unoccupied in the 1960s, was returned. According to family history, Hunter had expressed her Southern sympathies inside the sewing machine cabinet.
“I pulled the drawer out of that sewing machine and it is written right there: ’Hurrah for Jeff Davis.’ So that was really neat because it corroborated the oral history we had always heard,” he said. “It also says ‘Hurrah for Stonewall.’ That was a pretty cool thing to have come back.”
But Comer said under his tenure he wanted the house tours to focus less on objects and more on the time and people. Acquiring smaller objects, Comer and his staff tried to give the appearance the home was lived in.
“We tried to make the house, so when people looked in a room, it kind of helped the interpretation . . . A chair is a chair, people can figure that out. What I wanted to change our tours more to was the time period. How people lived. How it compares to us today. To try to draw parallels and contrasts between modern life and life in the 1860s - which wasn’t that much different really. People are people no matter when they live.”
He said he has encouraged the sites’ interpreters to learn as much about the time period as they can. This way, he said, they can answer visitors questions on any number of things from how food was prepared to slavery and yes, even furniture.
The tours are well received.
“We get a lot of people that say it is the best house tour they have ever had in their life and this is from people that go to a lot of historic homes,” Comer said. “So I think we have a very good product here to present to the public.”
Annually, the sites draw both locals and visitors from across the country. The figures for 2016 show 34,998 individuals came to Big Oak Tree State Park and 14,863 were at Morris State Park while there were 4,825 visitors to the Hunter-Dawson State Historic Site and 2,796 at Towosahgy.
But Comer emphasized numbers don’t always tell the full story. He explained that while Big Oak Tree State Park may have a much higher rate of visitors those visitors are on their own.
At the Hunter-Dawson Home, visitors have one-on-one interaction with the staff as they take the hour-long tour through the house.
It isn’t just about drawing tourists. Comer said he has sought to host activities at the site which bring in local residents as well.
“I think when you have an historic site like this that is well established and has been here a long time, that one of the things that happens is local folks think, ‘Well I have been to Hunter-Dawson, I don’t need to go back.’ We want them to come back. We want them to enjoy the facility because it is here in their neighborhood,” Comer said.
For area residents he and his staff host the popular candlelight tours at Christmas and an Easter egg hunt in the spring. Also over the years, Comer has organized and presented a Civil War Bootcamp to introduce youngsters to life as a Civil War soldier.
He is especially proud of the three re-enactments he organized to show what it would have been like in New Madrid when Confederates held the community along with the occupation by Federal troops following the fall of Island No. 10. Comer said the events drew many of the country’s top-notch re-enactors, who provided an accurate view of life during the Civil War.
Working with Comer to maintain the parks are Vicki Jackson, interpretative resource specialist, and Jeff Williamson, park maintenance worker in New Madrid, and Chadd Thomas, the park maintenance worker at Big Oak. They are assisted by seasonal employees as well.
Jackson said Comer’s departure will leave a big hole to fill.
“I have enjoyed working with Mike for the last 15 years,” Jackson said. “He has a lot of knowledge about the site, the Civil War, and the Victorian time period.”
According to Jackson, Comer was always willing to share what he knew about the site’s history and working with the public.
“I learned the importance of using people and not furniture as a focus in the tours,” she explained. “To talk about the people who lived there and the time period and to make it a personal experience for each person by focusing on what they find interesting.”
While Comer isn’t sure who or when his replacement will be named, he knows he will have plenty to do as a retiree. He intends to grow his hobby into business.
“I plan on keeping busy, I’m not going to vegetate,” Comer said. “ Gun smithing is something I have been wanting to do for quite a while. I’m looking forward to devoting more time to it.”
There will be more time for family. He and his wife, Diana, who is a nurse at New Madrid Elementary School, plan to remain in the New Madrid area. The couple have six children and nine grandchildren, all boys.
“I have a baseball team or a basketball team with a four-man bench,” Comer said with a grin.
According to Comer, it is time to move on but he is glad he found that job posting more than three decades ago.
“I often think, I could have made more money doing this or doing that but when I look back at it I just really can’t imagine doing anything else but this,” he said. “I think it was really my niche, where I fit in.
“ My goal has always been to educate people on their history when they come to one of my facilities. So they walk away with a better understanding with where they come from because we all come from our history,” he continued. “I would like to think I did a pretty good job at that.”
CLICK HERE FOR THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE AT THE SIKESTON STANDARD DEMOCRAT
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