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Southern Illinoisan (Carbondale, IL)
July 22, 2010 'Cairo: Then and Now'
Author: TOM BARKER

THE SOUTHERN

Architecture students document southernmost city

CAIRO - A four-year historical preservation project aims to keep the history of downtown Cairo in the books, as history and photography students from Southern Illinois University Carbondale have spent the past three days documenting the storied but deteriorated district.

The Preservation Summer Internship Program has sent architecture students to Illinois’ southernmost city for nearly a decade, but a new project launched last summer, titled "Cairo: Then and Now," has a more historical motive.

"We’ve been documenting downtown, and the reason we’re doing this is it was such a prolific downtown and it was completely and totally integrated," said Rachel Malcolm Ensor, director of the program.

Ensor, a history lecturer at the university, is writing a book on Cairo history as it progressed from 1862 to 1890, the time period being examined in the project, and how the demographic of the city drastically changed in those few decades.

As the Civil War came to an end in the Union Army’s favor, hundreds of thousands of freed African American slaves passed through the Cairo area, Ensor said, many of them settling and integrating the community.

The successful and then-unprecedented integration between peoples of all colors made Cairo an economic center for the entire region.

"At one point, Cairo began to rival Chicago because it was so busy and so commercially developed and because we had black businesses and white businesses right next door to one another," Ensor said. "People were making money and they were all happy about it."

The deteriorating buildings still standing in Cairo’s downtown area are a key to rediscovering the booming business life of the city’s past, Ensor said, and students will spend another two summers documenting, mapping and researching the structures.

"One of the ways we can find out where those businesses were exactly and locate them, and really tell people the glory of Cairo from this time period and its history, is by delineating downtown." she said.

Darren Schroeder, an SIUC photography student participating in the project through his large-format photography class, visited Cairo several times this week to take pictures of the area.

“We’re documenting everything, all the older buildings, so we have a record of what’s here," he said. "It’s sad that they’re in this condition, because it’s a really interesting town."

The "Cairo: Then and Now" project will not only gather information for the project’s future website and exhibits, but benefit future projects as well. The survey is also being completed for the Illinois Historical Preservation Agency, which may be able to approve the erection of new historical markers and provide funding for preservation projects.

‘We’re seeing the information and history collected through this project used in a lot of different ways, where they need it, Ensor said. "And to get grant money, you’ve got to know what you have and what you don’t have."