Iron, granite, and a Civil War fort

What’s in the hills

Iron, granite, and lead

Iron County is named for what was in its hills. Pilot Knob’s iron deposits were brought to notice in 1836, and over the following century the mountain gave up about 1.5 million tons of ore; nearby Iron Mountain, just over the line in St. Francois County, gave nearly 4 million more. The Iron Mountain Railroad ran through the Arcadia Valley, and the line still does today, with Amtrak’s Texas Eagle stopping at Arcadia.

Iron wasn’t the only thing worth digging. Red granite has been quarried near Graniteville since 1869, and stone from the area’s quarries went into St. Louis City Hall and the piers of the Eads Bridge. By the late 1920s Pilot Knob was being crushed for road gravel rather than mined for iron, and the Pilot Knob Ore Company stopped mining in 1987.

In 1955 the St. Joseph Lead Company found a new body of lead ore near Viburnum, at the county’s western edge, and the Viburnum No. 27 mine opened in 1960. That “New Lead Belt,” the Viburnum Trend, is the only part of Missouri’s lead district still mined, and it supplies most of the country’s primary lead.

Founding and early years

A county named for its ore

Iron County was organized on February 17, 1857 and named for the iron ore found within its borders. Ironton became its seat, and the Arcadia Valley, six miles long and ringed by the St. Francois Mountains, became its heart.

The battle and after

Fort Davidson, and mountains turned into parks

The Battle of Pilot Knob was the defining moment of Iron County’s Civil War. About 1,456 Union defenders inside Fort Davidson faced an army several times their size under Maj. Gen. Sterling Price, who was marching on St. Louis. The Confederate assaults were thrown back with heavy losses, and that night Ewing blew up the fort’s powder magazine and slipped his men past the Confederate lines. Price gave up on St. Louis, turned west, and was defeated at Westport a month later.

In the 20th century, the land itself became the attraction. Elephant Rocks opened as a state park in 1967 on land donated by a geologist, Fort Davidson was listed on the National Register in 1970, and Taum Sauk Mountain, Missouri’s highest point, became a state park in 1991. The old iron mines on Pilot Knob now shelter nearly a third of the world’s endangered Indiana bats, and Ironton has turned Shepherd Mountain into one of the Midwest’s newer mountain bike parks.