Filmmaker looks at Southern Illinois history February 06, 2007 CARBONDALE (AP) - Southern Illinois has many tales to tell. Some have been lost to the ages, and some are not well known; and there are many in need of discovery. Rich Kuenneke has a passion to document these stories. ''When I hear a good story about the region's history,'' he said, ''I want to tell it. I can't hold it in, I want to share it and give credit where it's due.'' With 20 years of experience writing for radio and television, including three years as a reporter for KFVS-TV and 16 years as a television producer for Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Kuenneke now has his own video production company, Oakview Road Media. ''I'm a writer-producer,'' he said. ''I create television content for my clients. Right now I'm working on a major training project for a local company.'' In his spare time, he chronicles the history of Southern Illinois in documentaries. ''I'm a niche producer, as far as the creation of history documentaries go,'' he explained. ''I am not interested in creating something to appeal to a massive audience. If that were a concern, I probably wouldn't do this work.'' The first historical documentary Kuenneke produced was ''Arti-facts and Heavy Timber: The Re-co-struction of Fort Massac.'' It received a major media grant from the Illinois Hu-manities Council and a Public Service Award from the Illinois Archae-ological Survey in 2005. His most recent release is ''The Search for Cantonment Wilkinsonville.'' That DVD tells the story of a team of archaeologists in an excavation of an 1801 military post on the lower Ohio River valley. The post was set up in the aftermath of the ''XYZ'' affair with France in 1797. U.S. President George Washington once again became Commander of the U.S. Army. Alexander Hamilton was his second in command. Hamilton saw war as an opportunity to seize more western territory by taking the lower Mississippi River valley in the event of war with France. Gen. James Wilkinson began to set up an encampment on the lower Ohio River and continued to do so after the crisis with France had been averted. It is not known why this plan was still put into action. There is some evidence of a possible conspiracy between Wilkinson and Aaron Burr, who was in the middle of a presidential election that had been thrown into the House of Representatives. At its high point, Cantonment Wilkinsonville housed as many as 1,500 U.S. troops, which was half of the American military at the time. The post was abandoned in 1802. Mark Wagner, an archaeologist at the SIUC Center for Archaeological Investigations, invited Kuenneke to the site with no expectations. It was just an opportunity for Kuenneke to videotape and watch. ''Mark and I had known each other through other things we had worked on together,'' Kuenneke said. ''He said 'Let's just dig a pit, I'll show you how it's done, and I'll talk a little about it.' Well, while he did it, he found a bayonet socket, which was amazing. He doesn't get very excited very often, but you could tell he was pretty excited about that.'' That ended up being a major find, the cornerstone of the archaeological project and the documentary. ''This said, 'OK everything is still here; it's just a matter of finding it,''' Kuenneke said. ''What was really cool was that I knew that I had a peg; I knew I had a really substantial thing to write about for that first part of the video and I could write to that. That was the peak of the story.'' The DVD is available from Kuenneke's website, clickonhistory.com. http://www.register-news.com/features/local_story_037114558.html