The Missouri Lead Belt (galena)

A French priest documented lead here in 1700, and they were still sinking shafts three centuries later.

The Southeast Missouri Lead District, known simply as the Lead Belt, holds deposits of galena and other metal-sulfide ores of the type geologists call Mississippi Valley. It is not a small area: the district takes in parts of Bollinger, Crawford, Dent, Iron, Jefferson, Madison, Perry, Reynolds, Saint Francois, Sainte Genevieve, Shannon and Washington counties. The US Geological Survey records past lead producers across it, including a shaft in St. Francois County held by the Federal Land Company.

Father James Gravier first discovered and documented the potential for lead mining here in 1700. Philip Francois Renault of France led a large exploratory mission in 1719 and had mining under way by 1720 at Old Mines and Mine La Motte, which established the Mine LaMotte and Fredericktown subdistrict, the first in the region.

Then it stalled. Production fell away between the 1750s and 1799, and what revived it was one man arriving with better methods. Moses Austin settled in 1799 at Potosi, then called Mine a Breton, and was the first here to sink deep shafts and to run smelting operations, which dramatically increased how much lead the district could produce.

Before Austin arrived the workings here were surface or near-surface holes less than ten feet deep. He changed the scale, and in 1808 he and Samuel Hammond founded Herculaneum as a shipping point on the Mississippi closer to the mines, displacing Ste. Genevieve. The Old Lead Belt subdistrict proper began in 1864, when the St. Joseph Lead Company opened the Bonne Terre Mine, and the names around it read like a roll call: Doe Run, Desloge, Leadwood, Flat River. The last Old Lead Belt mine, at Flat River, closed in 1972, ending 108 years of it.

The industry did not stop, it moved west. Reserves were falling by the late 1940s, and in 1955 the St. Joseph Lead Company found a new orebody near Viburnum, opening the Viburnum No. 27 Mine in 1960. Ten more followed, and that Viburnum Trend, the New Lead Belt, is the only subdistrict still mined for lead. Six mines were operating in 2022: Brushy Creek, Buick, Casteel, Fletcher and Sweetwater.

The best reason to come is what became of the old ground. Many Old Lead Belt mines have been abandoned or repurposed, and the large subterranean workings at Bonne Terre are now run commercially for tourism and scuba diving. You can dive a lead mine.