| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Gregg Andrews. Insane Sisters, or, The Price Paid for Challenging a Company Town. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. 1999. Pp. xii, 262. $29.95.

This book grew out of a history of Ilasco, Missouri, the small town in which Gregg Andrews and Mark Twain (among others) spent their childhood. Andrews uses a wide range of historical work, as well as extensive local records, to illuminate the lives of Mary Alice (Mollie) Heinbach and her sister, Euphemia (Feemy) B. Koller. Born in Pennsylvania in the mid-nineteenth century, they moved with their parents to Missouri after the Civil War. The heart of this book is a twentieth-century story, however, involving a lengthy and bitter property dispute between the two sisters and the Atlas Portland Cement Company. The ensuing legal conflicts ended up before the Missouri Supreme Court four times and produced nearly two thousand pages of trial transcripts. Only after Mollie had been adjudicated incompetent to manage her own affairs (in 1921) and Feemy declared insane and sent to the Missouri State Hospital (in 1929) did the Atlas Portland Cement Company acquire clear title to the property it needed for expansion in the Midwest. Mollie had died in 1928; her sister followed in 1930. Shortly before Feemy's death, U.S. Steel merged Atlas with its own steel company. The resulting corporation was by far the most powerful economic presence in the Ilasco area and the community's largest landlord, in large part thanks to its acquisition of the Heinbach tract. . . .

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