History
From the timber boom to the riverways
Around 1900, Carter County ran the biggest sawmill in America. A decade later the timber was gone, and the forest and the river became the county's future. This is that story.
The timber boom
Grandin and the biggest mill in America
For its first decades, Carter County was quiet country along the Current River. That changed in 1887, when the Missouri Lumber and Mining Company, formed by Pennsylvania lumbermen, moved in and began building a company town named for its principal stockholder, E. B. Grandin. The Frisco Railroad’s Current River branch reached Grandin in 1889.
Around 1900 the Grandin mill was the largest sawmill in the country, able to cut 75 million board feet a year; its best year, 1901, came close at nearly 66 million. The company owned about 100,000 acres in the county, Grandin swelled to 2,500 to 3,000 people, and one in six Carter County residents worked for the company.
It didn’t last. The last of the area’s timber was cut in 1909, the mill closed in 1910, and the mill and many of Grandin’s houses were moved to a new site in Shannon County that became West Eminence. Much of the county later became part of the Mark Twain National Forest, and its stretch of the Current part of the Ozark National Scenic Riverways.
Founding and early years
A county seat on the Current
Carter County was organized on March 10, 1859, from parts of Ripley, Shannon, and Wayne counties, and named for Zimri A. Carter, a pioneer who came from South Carolina. Its seat, Van Buren, was already a quarter-century old, a former Ripley County seat on the Current River.
The Civil War
A Southern-leaning county on the Current
Carter County was barely two years old when the war began. The 1860 census counted 1,197 free people and 20 enslaved people held by eight slaveholders, and most residents sided with the South. No major battle was fought here, but Union and Confederate troops moved up and down the Current River country, and Van Buren, the only real town, was at the center of it.
In August 1862, Union troops of the 24th Missouri Infantry surprised a small Confederate party near Van Buren, burned a mill and three houses, and seized Confederate mail with plans to attack Greenville. That fall, Missouri State Militia cavalry under Lt. Col. Bazel F. Lazear chased Col. David C. Boone’s Confederates out of Reynolds County. On October 22 they drove an estimated 450 of Boone’s men through Van Buren, then caught them again three days later near Pike Creek, west of town. About 40 Confederates were captured and sent to prison in St. Louis.
That winter, Gen. John W. Davidson’s Union Army of Southeast Missouri camped around Van Buren, about 3,000 men by one count. Confederates under Gen. M. Jeff Thompson, camped nearby, ambushed a Union company gathering supplies from local farms, and after about an hour the Union men pulled back, leaving their wagons behind. In March 1863 most of Davidson’s army left to join Grant’s Vicksburg campaign.
The regular armies did little lasting damage; the worst violence came from bushwhackers and jayhawkers, outlaw bands that were often local men settling grudges. One killed Thomas Gardner, the county’s first elected sheriff. After the war, freed people founded a community called Carterville about two miles south of Van Buren. Many died of disease that first winter, and their graveyard is at the mouth of Water Hollow on the Current River.
Van Buren
The county seat saw nearly all of the county’s recorded fighting: the August 1862 raid, Boone’s retreat through town in October, and skirmishes around the Union winter camp, one of them, the town’s historical marker says, at the Snider House west of town. The Songbird Trail at Watercress Recreation Area passes Civil War-era earthworks on a bluff over the river.
Ellsinore
There was no town here yet. Robert Patterson patented the land in 1857, and through the war it was farm and forest country in the county’s eastern hills. Charles Hearin, who later farmed it in corn and pumpkins, laid out Ellsinore along the new railroad in 1888–89, more than 20 years after the war.
Grandin
Grandin didn’t exist during the war either: the Missouri Lumber and Mining Company built it starting in 1887. Its roots do reach back to the 1860s, when O. H. P. Williams and his son-in-law E. B. Grandin heard of the pine timber in the Courtois Hills and began buying land in the region.
After the timber
A national forest, a national riverway, and a flood
The land and the river became the county’s future. Big Spring was a state park from 1924, and the Civilian Conservation Corps built its dining lodge and cabins in the 1930s. The Mark Twain National Forest was established in 1933, and in 1964 Congress authorized the Ozark National Scenic Riverways; in 1969 Missouri gave Big Spring to the National Park Service. In the early 2010s the Missouri Department of Conservation brought more than 100 elk from Kentucky to Peck Ranch, the state’s first free-ranging elk in about 150 years.
In April 2017 the Current River flooded Van Buren, putting the old courthouse under about six feet of water. FEMA paid to replace it with a new courthouse and justice center on higher ground at 1122 Main Street, and a volunteer group is working to restore the old cobblestone building as a welcome center.
Keeping the history
See it for yourself
Walk Grandin’s old company-town streets and Toliver Pond, see the cobblestone courthouse in Van Buren, and end at Big Spring, where the CCC’s 1930s buildings still stand around the spring.
To help save the old courthouse, contact the Friends of the Carter County Courthouse. For family history, the county’s MOGenWeb and FamilySearch pages are good starting points.
Plan a visit
Big Spring Entrance Station
The Ozark National Scenic Riverways’ year-round visitor contact point on the lower Current River, just outside Van Buren. Park headquarters in town (404 Watercress Drive) is an office only, with no visitor center.
- Location
- End of Route 103, south of Van Buren, MO 63965
- Phone
- (573) 323-4236
- Hours
- Open year-round. Call for current hours.
Verify before relying on this. Compiled from Wikipedia, the National Park Service, the Missouri Department of Conservation, the Van Buren historical marker, and Ozarks Alive’s reporting on the courthouse. Dates and figures vary between sources, especially for the Grandin mill and the Civil War skirmishes of late 1862.
