BlockBlackwater Township
The complete chapter on this township from A History of Cooper County, Missouri, from the First Visit by White Men in February, 1804, to the Fifth Day of July, 1876, published 1876. 322 words, covering 2 settlements. Source changes inside the text are labelled at the exact paragraph where the next book begins.
Contents
1 sectionThe section headings the book prints inside this chapter. Each one jumps to where it begins.
The modern record here
2 settlementsWhat the federal record holds for each settlement inside this township: wildfires and storm reports since the 1950s, mineral workings, and museum specimens collected nearby. These are counted within a few miles of each settlement, so neighbours share them and the columns are deliberately not added up. Every row links to the settlement's own page, where each figure is broken out.
| Settlement | Fires | Storm reports | Mines and quarries | Specimens |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Blackwater | 18 | 12 | 21 | - |
| Shackleford Crossing | 5 | - | 5 | - |
Settlements in this township
2 placesEvery populated place the Geographic Names Information System records inside this township's Census boundary. 1 of the 2 is named in the chapter; the other was founded later or was never more than a post office.
The chapter
322 wordsReproduced complete and unedited from A History of Cooper County, Missouri, from the First Visit by White Men in February, 1804, to the Fifth Day of July, 1876, published 1876. The text is machine-read from scans, so expect recognition errors: misspelled names, dropped words, and stray characters. Nothing has been corrected, because correcting a proper name invents one. The headings below are the books' own; source changes are labelled in place.
Blackwater Township
This township is a peninsular, being almost entirely surrounded by the Lamine and Blackwater rivers. The soil is rich and exceedingly productive. The bottom land is low and swampy, and the ridge land fertile and susceptible of early cultivation. In the bottom, corn and timothy are grown in large quantities ; on the ridge land, corn, wheat, oats, tobacco, potatoes, and all kinds of garden vegetables are produced in great abundance. The different kinds of wood are ash, beach, black oak, black walnut, cherry, cottonw®od, elm, maple, hickory, redbud, sugar tree, white oak, and white walnut.
There are, in this township, six salt and a great number of fresh water springs. Salt was successfully manufactured at these springs as early as 1808, and from that time till 1836 the manufacture of it was carried on pretty extensively by Heath, Bailey, Christie, Allison and others. There are four public schools for white, and one for colored children, supported by the inhabitants of this township.
There are two churches in this township ; one a Cumberland Presbyterian church, established in 1850 ; and the other a Baptist church, established in 1853.
There is at this time no store or mill in the township, although both are much needed by the citizens. There are two warehouses, from which the surplus productions of the township are shipped.
William Christie and John G. Heath temporarily settled in this township in 1808, but only remained long enough to manufacture a small quantity of salt, when they returned down the river. James Broch, the first permanent settler, arrived in 1816; Enoch Hambrich came in 1817 ; David Shellcraw, in 1818, and planted an acre of cotton which yielded very well. George Chapman, the father of Mrs. Caleb Jones, in 1818; Nathaniel T. Allison, Sr., in 1831 ; Fleming Marshall and Robert Clark, in 1832 ; Nathaniel Bridgewater, in 1835, ^^^ Edmund M. Cobb and Larkin T. Dix, in 1838.
Provenance
Text from A History of Cooper County, Missouri, from the First Visit by White Men in February, 1804, to the Fifth Day of July, 1876, published 1876, in the public domain in the United States and digitised by the Internet Archive. The settlements listed against this township are matched by point-in-polygon test of each Geographic Names Information System coordinate against the Census Bureau's county subdivision boundary, not by name.