Bonne Terre, photo by smalltowngirl
My most recent small town Missouri adventure was a freezing cold trip through Bonne Terre, Missouri. Bonne Terre is one of those old Midwestern mining towns that feels haunted to me as I walk its streets. I can so clearly imagine the time when Bonne Terre was booming and miners and railroad men spent their hard-earned money in the town’s bars, but the town simply isn’t that vibrant in 2009.
According to the sign in the picture, the first lead mining took place in what’s now Bonne Terre in the late 1790s, but the town wasn’t established until the 1880s. Jean Baptiste Pratte opened the area’s fist “lead diggings”. In 1864, all 946 acres of lead diggings were purchased from Pratte by the New York City-backed St. Joseph Lead Company. It was the St. Joseph Company who took the initiative to build the town of Bonne Terre.
Missouri is the oldest and largest lead-producing state in the United States, and Bonne Terre sits at the heart of the largest lead-mining district in the country. While the lead-belt’s history is rich, little remains now but historic sites and huge mounds of chat that, as kids, we called sand mountains.