Mills, springs, and a county seat that moved

Timber and rivers

From logging camps to the Riverways

Shannon County is big, wooded, and thinly settled: at about 1,004 square miles it’s the second-largest county in Missouri, home to about 7,000 people. From the 1880s to the 1920s, lumber companies cut its pine and oak forests, and the towns of Winona, Birch Tree, and West Eminence started out as their logging camps. When the timber was gone, reforestation brought the woods back.

The rivers shaped what came next. Mills rose at the big springs, Alley Spring’s red roller mill in 1894 and Walter Klepzig’s little turbine mill on Rocky Creek in 1928, and in 1913 an Illinois doctor built a hospital over the mouth of Welch Spring’s cave, hoping its cool air would heal. In 1964 Congress made the Current and Jacks Fork the heart of the Ozark National Scenic Riverways, the first national park area created to protect a river system.

Founding and early years

Copper, a log courthouse, and a new start

Shannon County was organized on January 29, 1841, and named for George F. “Peg-Leg” Shannon, the youngest member of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Its first seat stood on the Current River near Round Spring; the Eminence of today came only after the Civil War.

The Civil War

The burning of Old Eminence

Shannon County leaned toward the South; that sentiment helped keep it a Democratic stronghold for more than a century afterward. Few records survive from the war years, because the war itself destroyed them: the county seat near Round Spring, now known as Old Eminence, was burned, taking the log courthouse and all the county’s records with it. One account dates the burning to 1863.

Local tradition holds that court was held at other sites for a time after the seat was burned. When peace came, the county started over a dozen miles south, laying out a new Eminence on the Jacks Fork in 1868 on 50 acres deeded by Thomas J. Chilton, one of the few sites around with a clear title.

The river country

State parks, a national riverway, and wild horses

The twentieth century brought the river country its visitors. Alley Spring became a state park, and the Alton Box Board Company built a riverside retreat north of Round Spring in the late 1930s that is now Current River State Park. On March 18, 1925, the deadly Tri-State Tornado appears to have touched down first in Moore Township, Shannon County. In World War II, Missouri’s only manganese mine worked at Thorny Mountain nearby.

In 1964 the Riverways took in the Current and Jacks Fork. When the park moved to remove the wild horses that had roamed the river bottoms for generations, residents fought back, and a 1996 federal law made the herds a permanent part of the park. The newest chapter opened in 2016 with Echo Bluff State Park on Sinking Creek, and in November 2024 a flood damaged the bridge to Round Spring Cave, which stays closed for repairs in 2026.