Start Your Engines at St. Joe State Park

Once the site of a lead-processing mill, St. Joe State Park has become a popular place for recreation—and with good reason. Visitors can ride ATVs, go for a dip, ride horses, enjoy the hiking and biking trails, and camp overnight.

In 1972, when the St. Joe Minerals Corporation shut down its great lead-processing mill at Flat River, having largely exhausted nearby ore deposits, the future of the mined-out area had been forecast by popular usage. Aficionados of the new and versatile off-road vehicles (ORVs)—dune buggies, all-terrain vehicles (ATVs), and motorcycles—found a challenging playground in the abandoned piles of mine  waste, or chat, and hundreds of acres of tailings that formed a desert-like surface when pumped in behind a dam. Why not, company officials asked themselves, donate the whole area to the state for a park? 

Mining and the disposal of spoils had transformed about 1,200 acres lying south of the great mill in St. Francois County. But flanking the mined land on the east, west, and south, the company owned more than 7,000 additional acres, largely second-growth Ozark woodland but mostly natural, nevertheless. At its southern tip, the property even included a short reach of the St. Francis River in its scenic valley. Encouraged by the Missouri Department of Natural Resources, the company offered the whole tract to the state, including the deteriorating but still impressive Federal Mill, now Missouri Mines State Historic Site. Gov.Christopher Bond announced acceptance of the gift in December 1975; the deed of transfer was recorded in September 1976. 

Thus, Missouri acquired a highly diverse recreational area accommodating many different uses. Shortly after the transfer, the Southeast Missouri Regional Planning and Economic Development Commission at Perryville secured funding to study the economic, social, and physical impact of the new park and to develop a master plan for it. In the commission’s March 1979 report, the planners predicted the park could expect “nearly 500,000 visitors each year when fully developed.” St. Joe reached a high of 855,362 visitors in 2006 and regularly welcomes more than 600,000 a year. A third of the visitors come from out of state. ORV enthusiasts, well over half of them in family groups, make up most of the visitors and probably always will, as this is one of the few parks that allows them. Another state park also acquired in the mid-1970s welcomes them: Finger Lakes, in an old coal-mining area north of Columbia. Motorcycles and other ORVs had once ranged through many of the parks, causing numerous complaints, but the General Assembly effectively excluded them in 1971 when it passed a law restricting all motor vehicles to park roads and to a maximum speed of twenty miles per hour. The provision of two parks for ORVs helped win public acceptance of the new restrictions. 

The 2,000-acre ORV riding area at St. Joe is made up of about 800 acres of tailings sand flats and 1,200 acres of wooded slopes. Trails in the area have been created by riders, although wider vehicles such as dune buggies and four-wheelers are instructed to stay out of the wooded areas. With the help of dedicated volunteers, the wooded trails and perimeter gates have been mapped and posted with signs. Grants for recreational trails have also been used by volunteer groups, including Friends of St. Joe State Park and Missouri Dirt Riders, and park staff to improve and maintain trails and develop other amenities, such as a children’s riding area, an ORV education website, and a concession building. ORV users have a designated campground with direct access to the riding area. 

Four small clear-water lakes—Jo Lee, Pim, Monsanto, and Apollo—were formed in the upper arms of Shaw Branch behind the tailings deposits pumped into the arms of the little valley. All are popular with anglers, yielding the typical pond species: black bass, crappie, bluegill, and channel catfish. Monsanto and Pim lakes have excellent swimming beaches, their sandy bottoms sloping gradually into deeper water. Monsanto, at twenty-five acres the largest lake, has an Americans with Disabilities Act-accessible fishing dock and trail for bank fishing. There are also several picnic areas with playgrounds for children. 

Eleven miles of paved bicycle and hiking trails encircle the ORV area, created on the abandoned beds of logging roads and a railroad used by the mining company to haul raw ore from the producing mines to the processing mill. Approximately six miles of spurs lead to Missouri Mines State Historic Site, the Pim day-use area, and to Farmington. Several other hiking, biking, and equestrian trails totaling more than seventeen miles traverse the rugged oak and hickory woods in the western and southern portions of the park. Mountain biking is growing in popularity, and cycling clubs in nearby lead-belt cities and from as far away as St. Louis schedule events here. Equestrians have a specially equipped campground and staging area at the southern end of the park. Also in the south end is a flying field for radio-controlled devices. 

A number of special events, generally hosted by user groups, are held at St. Joe annually, including several national motorized competitions that draw ORV riders from across the nation. There are also various mountain biking and equestrian events, and of course, the usual hiking, birding, and wildflower group activities. 

Scientific advancement in the twentieth century identified the dangers of exposure to lead; as a result, lead testing, including air monitoring, has been ongoing throughout the park’s history. Between public health concerns and a tenuously constructed dam, St. Joe could have been the site of more than a few catastrophes. Fortunately, the problems have been remedied in time, and the park is now safer than ever and, perhaps, more beautiful too. For more than a hundred years, this “old lead belt” area of Missouri provided the nation with the majority of its lead needs. Miners extracted the rocks in which galena was embedded and hauled them to the surface for processing. At the mill, the ore was crushed to a fine grit. It was then mixed with water and chemicals to separate the galena from the rest of the material. After the galena concentrate was dried, it was hauled to a smelting plant elsewhere and heated, burning off the sulfur and leaving pure lead. The waste material left behind at the mill, known to the miners as slime, was ready for disposal. 

In those simpler times, it was just piped as a slurry into the four upstream arms of the nearby valley of Shaw Branch, which had been blocked with a rubble rock dam. The water from the slurry drained through the dam, leaving the tailings behind. In time, after about sixty years, the mining and milling activity completely filled the valley with 1,200 surface acres of tailings, 800 behind the dam, in some places a hundred feet deep, and another 400 acres downstream from the dam. 

The dam had been cobbled together over the decades by adding material as needed at the top. A 1992 Army Corps of Engineers study of mine dams in the Big River basin found that only one of forty-five dams was safe and twenty-seven dams were high-hazard, of which the dam in St. Joe State Park posed perhaps the greatest danger of catastrophic failure and would be the most expensive to renovate, at an estimated $14 million. Fortunately, the study recommended federal help through Superfund, the federal program enacted in 1980 for cleaning up hazardous wastes, and in 1997 the dam was stabilized. 

But the 1,200 acres of tailings still required remediation. The work began in the 1990s with removal of chat from campsite pads and playground areas and replacement with rock or mulch. In 2005 the beaches at Pim and Monsanto lakes were covered with clean sand, and grassy areas and concrete walkways were built, in each case with work done cooperatively by park crews and the Doe Run Company, successor to St. Joe as the result of a 1986 merger. Finally in 2011, the Environmental Protection Agency approved funding for a $7 million tailings cleanup plan submitted on behalf of Doe Run and the Missouri Department of Natural Resources. The plan provided for covering tailings with rock on certain slopes and in drainages, establishing vegetation on the flats, and surfacing the ORV trails with clean material. 

During the same decades that the lead tailings remediation was occurring, the natural history values of this diverse park increasingly attracted the attention of park naturalists, who in 1992 began restoring several thousand acres of woodlands with many glades and occasional prairie openings on the broadest of the high flat ridges. Glades with their distinctive communities of grasses and wildflowers can be found on rocky sunny slopes,mostly on the west side of the park. Naturalists have learned that significant stands of native shortleaf pine and oak woodlands in the eastern and southern parts of the park are the most botanically diverse of any in the park system. A single one-fourth of a square meter plot in this area holds the park system record for the largest number of different plant species in a single monitoring plot: thirty-six. 

On the western side, the Harris Branch watershed, which is almost completely contained within the park, is considered to be a significant potential natural area. It has a healthy colony of colorful dark-sided salamanders and glades with large populations of prairie iris. The park also harbors a breeding population of the eastern wood peewee, and its entire vicinity has been designated an Important Bird Area. The challenge for the future will be to prevent erosion, trampling, and encroachment by ORVs, horses, and invasive species, while park stewardship crews continue their efforts to reintroduce fire and restore the richness, diversity, and beauty of this large, contiguous expanse of surprisingly diverse Ozark woodland. 

The remarkable range in outdoor recreation and natural and cultural resources makes St. Joe State Park a destination for people throughout the Midwest. From its not-so-propitious beginnings as a mined-out expanse, the park has developed into a safe, enjoyable haven for family recreation and an Ozark Border landscape of memorable beauty and interest. 

JOE STATE PARK • 2800 PIMVILLE ROAD, PARK HILLS 

Featured photo courtesy of Martin Turner.