Mark Twain National Forest has a wide range of popular recreation opportunities. With seven Wilderness Areas, the Ozark Trail, the Eleven Point Wild and Scenic River, many campgrounds and day use areas, springs, and areas such as Fuchs House at Markham Springs you are sure to discover your place to unplug and make the Mark Twain part of your story.

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Current Recreation Conditions

Spotlights

Falling Springs Picnic Ground

Once you step out of your car this site will transport you back in time.

This is a rustic picnic area with abundant history, and minimal conveniences. The day use facility is situated on the edge of a pond formed by a spring. The around the pond is open and grassy. Oak and pine forest surround the site.

The spring, one of our most photographed areas on the Forest, is known as Falling Spring because water pours out of the rock above the pond as a small waterfall. In the early 1900’s the spring provided power for two mills. To get to the mill there is a wooden treadway.

Also located on the site is a log cabin that is over 100 years old.

Falling Spring Mill

Built between 1927 and 1929, Falling Spring Mill was used to grind corn for feed, saw out shingles, saw firewood, and generate electricity on the site. The second of two mills, it differed from the original structure in that the first had a wooden wheel.

The mill was first constructed of timber, then later enclosed with saw board siding. The mill’s present overshot wheel came from Johnson Spring, located approximately three miles down Hurricane Creek from Falling Spring.

The former mill sits under a bluff where water comes out of a cave opening to form a spring, about 15 feet above the ground. When the mill was in use, a wooden flume went from the spring to the small mill.

The mill is unique for the time period it was built in, the size is small compared to most of the mills in the area at the time, which were much larger.

Thomas Brown Cabin

Thomas and Jane Brown homesteaded the Falling Spring area in 1851. They settled in a land which looked very similar to their homeland, Tennessee.

The area around Falling Spring provided for their basic needs – water for livestock and personal use, and trees from which to build a cabin. Known today as the Tomas Brown Cabin, it was the first of four houses built near the site.

One of the reasons the cabin remains today because of the use of half-dovetail notching used on the corners. The notching helped shed water off the logs.

“We crossed the Mississippi River at what was called Green’s Old Ferry and we crossed the Ohio River at what was called Golconda in an old horse boat. In that company were 17 persons. They were the Brown Family and my mother’s two sisters (named Fowler) and the Reaser family”

“On reaching Missouri, the eldest brother, James M., shook hands with each of his brothers and sisters, bade them farewell, and departed northward, settling in the St. Joseph area. The rest of the company continued to Oregon County.”  - Written April, 1929, by James Brown in his granddaughter, Dorothy Thompson’s, graduation memory book.