My Journey to Wolkes
by Bob Brail
Maps and photo are at end of the article.
This article had its beginning in a 1919 Missouri State Highway Department map of St. Charles County I found on the website of the State Historical Society of Missouri while looking for ideas to write about. As I glanced over the map, one of several I have seen of St. Charles County over the years, I was surprised to see a town I had never before heard of. There in the extreme southwest corner of the county was Wolkes. “Was this a mistake?” I wondered. I have been writing articles about Boone-Duden country for fifteen years now, yet the name Wolkes was new to me. My journey to Wolkes had begun.
First, I thought I might find that someone named Wolkes had lived in the area designated on the map. I checked the 1905 St. Charles County, Missouri, Plat Book, but found no one named Wolkes living near Wolkes. Then I took a look at the 1920 Federal Population Census for both St. Charles and Warren Counties, and struck out again: nobody named Wolkes in either place in 1920. So I checked 1910: again, nobody. Next I checked 1900: no Wolkes.
What I did notice as I looked for someone named Wolkes was that there were a lot of folks named Voelkerding living in the area of Wolkes. (There were also several Voelkerding families living in Charette Township, just across the county line.) In fact, in the 1905 plat book Voelkerdings owned approximately 900 acres of land on either side of the MKT railroad tracks in Survey 1673 and the area surrounding that survey. Was it possible, I wondered, that Wolkes was simply an abbreviation and corruption (change) of Voelkerdings? In other words, the neighborhood where all the Voelkerdings lived became known as Voelks and then Wolkes.
As my journey to Wolkes continued, I began checking several online newspapers for references to Wolkes. About an hour into this effort, I finally found the name in The Marthasville Record. Six brief articles, none more than a few sentences in length, between 1907 and 1914 contained references to this area in southwestern St. Charles County. However, the town referred to in these articles was not simply Wolkes, but Wolkes Spur! This made some sense to me because I knew the village was located on the MKT railroad. But why would a railroad spur have been built here?
The six articles shed no light on that question but did provide some interesting facts about Wolke's Spur. For example, the village had a baseball team and its own field in 1907. Three of the six articles were about this team. One of the families claiming Wolkes Spur as home was the Kruse family. A load of lumber was shipped from Wolkes Spur in 1908. Besides these newspaper articles, I also found one reference to Wolke's Spur on books.google.com: The ABC Pathfinder Shipping and Mailing Guide for 1906, published by the New England Railwy Publishing Company, listed Wolkes Spur in St. Charles County. Wolke's Spur was located 3.5 miles west of Augusta and 4.5 miles east of Dutzow.
What had happened to this town and its railroad spur? Did the town's fate have something to do with Nona, the MKT station just to the east of Wolke's Spur? I decided to check The Marthasville Record for references to Nona. What I found was very interesting. The newspaper's first reference to Nona was on May 8, 1914, less than two months after its last reference to Wolke's Spur. It looked as if Wolke's Spur had ceased to exist in a matter of weeks, and Nona suddenly sprung into existence. In its February 27, 1914, issue the newspaper had referred to “Miss Ruth Kruse of Wolke's Spur,” and in its May 8, 1914, issue this person became “Miss Ruth Kruse of Nona”!
I was still wondering if the Voelkerding families had anything to do with a railroad spur being constructed in their area, so I took a look in The Marthasville Record for occurances of their name. It was worth the effort because there I found an even earlier reference to Wolke's Spur, but in the September 28, 1906, issue of the newspaper, it is called Voelkerding's Spur. Other references to Voelkerding's Spur occurred in June, 1909, and September, 1913. Now my earlier idea about Wolke's being an abbreviation/corruption of Voelkerdings seemed correct: Voelkerding's Spur became more commonly known as Wolke's Spur, and then just Wolkes.
I also discovered that in early 1905, some of the Voelkerdings from Wolke's Spur had purchased the Scholz home and blacksmith shop in Dutzow, and converted the shop into a factory for manufacturing sparrow traps, the Voelkerding Brothers Manuracturing Company. Herman and Anna Voelkerding had raised ten children, including four sons. Otto and Fritz were the brothers tied most closely to the business. Otto moved his family into the old Scholz home.
Soon the focus was on rat traps. For a time at least, their business apparently did well. The advertisement to the left appeared in The Marthasville Record on December 7, 1906. This was just over two months after the newspaper's first mention of the railroad spur. Could the Voelkerdings have built the spur as a place from which to ship their traps? Why would they have done this when Dutzow had a train station they could have used?
The rat trap factory in Dutzow apparently did not last long. It continued in business at least until September, 1907, when the Marthasville newspaper last mentions it. In the 1910 Federal Population Census, no Voelkerdings in either Warren County or St. Charles County were involved in manufacturing. Fritz Voelkerding was a farmer near Wolke's Spur, and Otto Voelkerding was a blacksmith in Washington, Franklin County, having moved from the Dutzow house next to the rat trap factory. I could find no reference to Korker Automatic Rat Traps anywhere in the United States after 1907.
About this time I decided to contact fellow local historian Paul Ovaitt, who has done dozens of interviews with Augusta-area residents, to see if he had ever heard of Wolkes. Paul said he had not, but that he would ask around. His requests led to no information. No one had ever heard of Wolkes.
Now it was time to take an actual journey to Wolkes to have a look at the area, so my wife and I drove down Highway 94 through Augusta, went west on Augusta Bottom Road, passed the Nona grain elevator, and parked just east of Emke Road. We were hoping that there would be some evidence of the Voelkerding railroad spur, and we were not disappointed. About 1000 feet east of the point where the road crosses the Katy Trail, there is a very noticeable widening of the trail on its north side. This appears to be the point at which the spur veered to the northwest, and it is definitely located on property that belonged to the Voelkerdings. The spot is marked with a black circle on the 1905 plat map to the right. It is also within the area indicated as Wolkes on the 1919 highway department map.
All I can do is speculate about the relationship of Nona and Wolkes, two very small communities almost literally within shouting distance of each other. Were the elevator and stockyard built at Nona because the Voelkerdings' price for their land was too high? Were the Voelkerdings members of the Nona Farmers Elevator Company? Was the spur removed by the MKT Railroad after it established a station at Nona?
It is at this point that my journey to Wolkes becomes our journey. It is my hope that at least one person who reads this article knows something about Wolkes that is not mentioned here, and that person will contact me so that I can pass the information on to all the readers of this newsletter.
