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This year’s Southwestern Michigan College extended learning experience exposed history students to “Pioneer America” in Galena and Springfield, Ill., and St. Louis, Mo.

The group, led by Professors Jeff Dennis, Natalie Anagnos and Robin Shipkosky, left campus Thursday, March 13. Students Gabby Alfaro, Aurora Carney, Lavon James, Thorin Palmer, Aften Avery, Corbin Haines, MK Khosravani, Xander Ruiz, Kaylee Brooks, Gus Hubbard and Lanie McCormick participated.

SMC underwrites all of the lodging, touring, lunch and transportation costs for these co-curricular trips. Dennis has organized such trips for the past 10 years except 2020-21 during the pandemic.

Destinations have included Virginia, Michigan, Cincinnati, Kentucky, Iowa, South Dakota, Wyoming, Ohio, West Virginia, South Carolina and Tennessee.

Other SMC travel opportunities to broaden students’ experiences include SkillsUSA for criminal justice, American Chemical Society meetings (most recently in New Orleans), and Chicago psychology conferences.

The Ulysses S. Grant home is in Mississippi River town Galena. Married to Julia in 1848, the couple, four children in tow, moved to Galena in 1860, when Ulysses took a job as a clerk in his brother’s store. Applauding the general’s rise to fame during the Civil War, city fathers commissioned an Italianate home, preserved today much as it was during their residence.

At the Galena and U.S. Grant Museum, the group peered into the shaft of a 19^th-century lead mine still nestled deep within the belly of the building. Galena once ranked as a leading commercial center on the upper Mississippi with a pre-Civil War population more than four times today’s.

March 14’s first stop was the Illinois State Capitol. Completed after 20 years of construction in 1888, the building is taller — 405 feet from the top of its flagpole — than any other U.S. capitol, including Washington, D.C’s.

Leaving the Capitol, the professors and students visited the Lincoln Tomb, its marble exterior completed in 1874, but its interior not finished until the 1930s in the art deco popular then.

Twenty miles north and west sits New Salem Village, a recreation of the pioneer community where Lincoln began his rise. The SMC group toured the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum in Springfield on Friday afternoon.

In Missouri Saturday, March 15, SMC witnessed the singular story of Daniel Boone, who explored the frontier into his 80s. Hubbard said New Salem Village and Boone’s house made for “the best trip of my life.” For Avery, “History is about learning the human side of big figures. We see people like Lincoln, Grant and Boone and hear the adventures, but forget the small things, the sadness and joy they lived through.”

At the Mississippi, St. Louis long served as the nation’s prime portal to the West. Gateway Arch is the tallest U.S. monument at 630 feet. Visitors ride to the top in “little tram bubble cars” that hold five.

Haines especially enjoyed the arch. “Coming from a construction background, I found the video on its construction very interesting. The lack of safety equipment was interesting compared to all the rules we have now.”

March 16 brought the SMC group to the St. Louis Zoo, named the nation’s best by USA Today. “Flight Cage,” an immense aviary, 50 feet high with a span of nearly a football field, is a relic of the 1904 World’s Fair.

Brooks singled out the Cathedral Basilica and the zoo. “The cathedral was so stunning I had an emotional response,” she said, and “it was remarkable to see a grizzly bear for the first time.” The cathedral “was breathtaking,” Alfaro agreed. “I got a chance to pray and light a candle for a family member. All the places were so perfectly selected.”

The group also toured the Museum of Illusions, where visual, auditory and tactile trickery abounds — some facilitated by high-tech holograms.