Your Guide to the Ozarks
Mills, battlefields, courthouses, and preserved settlements: the places where the Ozarks keeps its history, each verified against its managing agency or historical society.
A National Register historic district of stone and timber buildings the Civilian Conservation Corps built at Big Spring in the 1920s and 1930s: a dining lodge, cabins, and a museum, closed for restoration but walkable today.
Missouri's only cobblestone-covered courthouse, built in 1871 and reclad by the WPA in 1936, stands vacant on its Main Street square in Van Buren, still the town's gathering ground for tree lightings and the Festival of Lights.
Walter Klepzig's little turbine mill still stands in the shut-in canyon of Rocky Creek, unsigned and easy to pass by, at the end of a dirt road or a hike from Rocky Falls.