Butler County, Missouri

Butler County is a county in the southeastern part of the state of Missouri. It was officially organized on February 27, 1849 and named for William O. Butler, a prominent general and politician. The county had a population of 42,794 at the 2010 census. Poplar Bluff is the county seat and largest city.

History

The area of future Butler County was originally peopled by members of the Mississippian culture, who constructed extensive mounds and villages in the region during the first millennium AD and afterwards. An excavation west of Neelyville in the 1960s unearthed several dwellings which date to before 1200, and others have been identified elsewhere in the county. During the 18th and early 19th centuries, it was under the dominion of the powerful Osage tribe, though members of the Delaware, Shawnee, and Cherokee tribes moved into the area near the end of the period.

From the mid-18th century onward, French explorers and traders used the Black and St. Francis rivers to make contact with the natives and pan for salt; and a few may have lived in the area permanently from the 1770s onward. Serious settlement did not begin, however, until the arrival of American pioneers in the 1810s. The first region to be heavily populated was Cane Creek, in what is now the northwestern part of the county. Settlement would be concentrated along the rivers and creeks, northwest of the Mississippi bottomlands, but overall the population grew only slowly compared to other regions. Shortly before Missouri gained statehood, the area was included within the newly-organized Wayne County; due to its distance from the county seat of Greenville, however, demands for a separate administration gradually increased. In 1849, the southern portion of Wayne County was separated and organized as Butler County, named for William O. Butler (1791-1880) of Kentucky, a general of the Mexican War and the Democratic vice-presidential nominee in 1848. The site of Poplar Bluff, at the head of navigation on the Black River, was chosen for the county seat.

As Butler County did not lie along major routes of north-south travel, no significant military actions were fought within its boundaries during the Civil War; however, units of both the Union and Confederate armies passed through the county from time to time, and intermittent guerrilla warfare led to most of the population departing before the war's end. The county did not significantly recover until after 1873, when the extension of the Cairo, Arkansas, & Texas Railroad west from Illinois to Poplar Bluff provided direct access to the Mississippi River and more opportunities for economic expansion. Timber harvesting and large-scale agriculture were among the most significant activities by the turn of the century and for some time thereafter.

One of the deadlier tornadoes in American history struck the Poplar Bluff area on May 9, 1927, destroying most of the downtown region and killing 98 people. Flooding on the St. Francis River to the east was also a major problem periodically, until the construction of Wappapello Dam in 1941.

Although logging and agriculture gradually declined during the mid-20th century as a major source of employment, the county has remained fairly prosperous overall, thanks to the prominence of Poplar Bluff as a regional economic hub and to the presence of several major highways, including U.S. Routes 60 and 67. Unlike many counties in southern Missouri, its population has remained stable or even slightly increased in recent decades.