In 1869 the lawyer and future railroad entrepreneur and historian Louis Houck rode the court circuit to Kennett with other lawyers and court officials. Upon reaching a point south of Bloomfield, as he later wrote, “I sat down on a hillside on the left of where Dexter now stands, looking over a vast forest of timber on all sides, greatly impressed; not a single farm in sight or opening in the vast woods except at the foot of the hill, an open place known as Miller’s Farm. Going south for miles we traveled along the edge of what was known as the East Swamp, all covered with heavy timber.”
Houck observed just a small part of the hundreds of thousands of acres of wetland forest that covered southeasternmost Missouri prior to clearing and drainage. The region occupies former channels of the Mississippi and St. Francis rivers, and their tributaries. The species of trees, their size, density, and age depended on factors related to soils, elevation, history, and past land use. The lowest sites were old river channels or sloughs scoured by flooding, dominated by water-tolerant baldcypress and tupelo. Some forests at lower elevations where crop growing was not feasible, supported baldcypress-tupelo forest dating back 1000 years or more. Distinct species of oaks, ash, sweetgum, sassafras, persimmon, and cottonwood prospered at sites that were subtly different in elevation, meaning the sites might flood only seasonally at higher sites or for prolonged time in wet years at lower sites.
Historical events molded the forests of the southeast lowlands. The New Madrid earthquakes thrust some areas upward, while others sank, burying existing forests and altering local elevations. A few areas had second-growth forest resulting from clearing near the few settlements such as New Madrid. Scouring from floods along the major rivers carved away some areas and deposited sediment on others.
A long-ignored factor determining the age and extent of bottomland forests in the region was alterations by Indigenous people. While Hernando de Soto never reached Missouri in 1541-42, he described large populations of Indigenous people living in towns supported by vast crop fields in Arkansas. Substantial evidence of occupation existed along southeast lowland streams, as well as vast areas of river cane, which colonized open areas such as abandoned crop fields, suggesting a large population.
European diseases, displacement, warfare, and social upheaval reduced these populations by 95% in the years after De Soto. With field abandonment and disappearance of agriculture, tree seedlings survived and girdling of mature trees to clear for agriculture ceased. Forests established on higher ground in the mid-16th to mid-17th century and would have been over 100 years old by the time the French first arrived in 1712.
Many of the older trees were massive. One cypress in Kennemore Slough measured 15 feet in diameter. Hardwoods at many sites were four or five feet in diameter and up to 150 feet tall. Another story mentions three cow oaks between seven and nine feet in diameter, and sweetgum up to five feet in diameter.
With clearing and drainage in the early 1900s, only hints of the former forests exist today at places like Big Oak Tree State Park, Mingo National Wildlife Refuge, and other protected areas. Most of these areas differentially protect lower elevations of the wetlands because these were more difficult to drain. What remains is some of the most productive farmland in the world, a vastly different landscape than Houck saw in 1869.
