Carter County, Missouri

Carter County is a county in the southeastern part of the state of Missouri. It had a population of 6,265 at the 2010 census. The county was officially organized on March 10, 1859 and named for Zimri A. Carter, one of the region's first settlers. Van Buren is the county seat and largest city. Carter County is part of the larger Ozarks region.

History

Though it is one of the least populous counties in southeast Missouri, Carter County's past is among the best-documented, thanks to the work of local historians and genealogists.

The first settlement in the area was made by the Carter family, which moved to Missouri from South Carolina in 1807, initially settling in the Missouri River valley before relocating to a spot near the Current River and about eight miles southeast of present-day Van Buren, sometime between 1812 and 1820. These moves were undertaken by Benjamin Carter; however, he was soon joined by his son Zimri, who had previously spent time in the flatboat trade on the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers. Zimri Carter soon became the leading figure in the area, attracting other settler families and later serving as a county judge.

At this time, the region was part of Wayne County, which then encompassed a large section of southern Missouri. In 1833, it and neighboring territory were separated to form the new Ripley County; that same year, the town of Van Buren was founded to serve as the county seat, with a log-cabin courthouse being constructed in 1853 (replaced by a wood-frame building in 1867). In 1859, as its population had increased significantly, the northern portion of Ripley County was split off by the state legislature to form a new county, named for leading citizen Zimri Carter. Van Buren continued to serve as the county seat for the district, to which adjoining portions of Shannon and Wayne Counties were also added. The new county still had a very low population; at the 1860 Census, it had just 1,235 persons, including 20 slaves.

Like most of southern Missouri, Carter County was torn by the Civil War, in which most of the residents appear to have sympathized with the South. Owing to its relative isolation and rugged terrain, no significant battles were fought within the county, though sizable Union and Confederate units did march through the area from time to time, and a few skirmishes did occur, especially in 1862-63 when a Union force was encamped in and around Van Buren. Most of the violence came from local guerrilla bands that feuded with the others and their sympathizers. Some freed or escaped slaves from across the region appear to have formed a community of sorts near the Current River, called "Carterville"; however, it only lasted a few months.

Post-war economic recovery was spurred by the timber boom of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as a number of businesses sought to make large profits from the vast virgin pine forests that still blanketed the county. The boom began in the late 1880s, when the Missouri Lumber and Mining Company extended a branch of the St. Louis-San Francisco ("Frisco") Railway to the new town of Grandin in the far south. Massive sawmills in and around Grandin produced, at their peak, some 60 to 70 million board feet of lumber every year, from trees felled in Carter and neighboring counties. In 1917, meanwhile, even as the timber boom was passing its peak, the Mid-Continent Iron Company provided another economic boost, opening a smelter on land north of Fremont to process iron ore shipped from Michigan. A large town called Midco sprang up on the site, with a population as high as 3,000 at one point, finding work in the smelter as well as in a short-lived chemical plant to supply the U.S. Army during World War I. These enterprises made Carter County an economic hub for a time, and many flocked to the area for employment; it hit an all-time population high of 7,482 in the 1920 census.

The county's boom years ended around 1920. The virgin timber had already been cut, and most of the sawmills had closed or relocated; and Mid-Continent Iron ceased its operations in 1921, with the community of Midco drying up and already a ghost town by the 1930s. In ensuing years, residents struggled to make a living, as the denuded land was of poor use for agriculture, and there was little wildlife remaining. The population steadily declined from its peak, hitting a low of 3,878 in 1970. However, outdoor tourism gradually succeeded in reversing the county's fortunes. The creation of federal and state parks, including Big Spring State Park and the Mark Twain National Forest, stimulated efforts to preserve and revive the local ecology, and improved conservation programs led to the regrowth of the forests. The inclusion of the Current River within the Ozark National Scenic Riverways in 1972 sparked interest in the river's potential for recreation, and Van Buren especially became a center for canoeing, swimming, and camping. Since the 1970s, Carter County has steadily risen in both population and economic prosperity.