Springs, mills, and the Irish Wilderness

Water and stone

Springs, sinks, and mills

Oregon County sits on the Arkansas line in the heart of the Ozarks, and more of it is national forest than any other county in Missouri. Water runs underground here as much as on top: the stream that disappears into Grand Gulf, a cave whose roof fell in, comes back up across the state line at Mammoth Spring, Arkansas, and Greer Spring pours about 210 million gallons a day into the Eleven Point River.

Those springs ran the county’s mills. Samuel Greer built his mill above Greer Spring in 1883, Turner Mill turned a 25-foot wheel on the Eleven Point, and Falling Spring Mill ground corn, sawed wood, and made electricity in the late 1920s. In 1968 the Eleven Point became one of the first rivers protected under the National Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, still the only one in Missouri.

Founding and early years

From Thomasville to Alton

Oregon County was organized on February 14, 1845, and named for the Oregon Country, then at the center of a national dispute with Britain. Its first seat was Thomasville; in 1859 the county moved it to a new, more central town, Alton.

The Civil War

A colony lost and a courthouse burned

Oregon County was a young frontier county when the war came, and it was hit hard. Father Hogan’s Irish colony, only a few years old, broke apart amid the raids and violence of the war years, and its families scattered; the hills they left behind are still called the Irish Wilderness. In October 1863 Union troops burned the courthouse in Alton, the county seat for only four years, and many of the county’s early records went with it.

Railroad and river

A railroad town, a wild river, and a wilderness

The railroad made Thayer the county’s biggest town: around 1900, about 400 railroad men lived there, and the line still runs through. Out in the hills, the timber and mills gave way to the Mark Twain National Forest, which now covers more of Oregon County than of any other county in the state.

The land became the draw. The Eleven Point was protected as a Wild and Scenic River in 1968, Grand Gulf became a state park and a National Natural Landmark, and the Irish Wilderness became Missouri’s largest federally protected wilderness. The Forest Service restored Greer Mill in 2016, and a new state park along the Eleven Point east of Alton is in the works.