Swamp to cotton country

River and ridge

The St. Francis, the swamps, and Crowley’s Ridge

Dunklin County is the western part of the Bootheel, the strip of Missouri that dips south below the 36°30′ line, and most of the county lies south of that line. The St. Francis River forms its western edge, and where the river leaves Missouri for Arkansas is the lowest point in the state.

This was once floodplain and wetland. In the 1890s the state began a large drainage program in the St. Francis River basin, and after the timber was cut, the cleared land went into cotton and other crops. Morris State Park near Campbell protects a piece of Crowley’s Ridge, which runs through southeast Missouri and northeast Arkansas.

Founding and early years

From Chilletecaux to Kennett

Dunklin County was created from Stoddard County onFebruary 14, 1845, and named for Daniel Dunklin, a former governor of Missouri. Kennett became its seat.

A town and its courthouses

Three names and four courthouses

Kennett began as a cluster of log cabins called Chilletecaux, after a Delaware chief who lived there. Renamed Butler in the late 1840s, it had to change again because of mail mix-ups with other towns of the same name, and took the name of Luther M. Kennett, the mayor of St. Louis.

The county’s first courthouse, a log cabin built in 1847, burned in the mid-1860s, and a second, built in 1872, burned soon after it was finished. A brick courthouse followed in 1892, and the present courthouse was built in 1929. In the 1890s the railroad reached Kennett and the town began to grow.

Since then

A museum, a ridge, and a national medal

Dunklin County’s population peaked at 45,329 in 1950. In 1981 Kennett’s 1903 City Hall and Masonic Lodge went on the National Register of Historic Places, and in 1986 it became home to the Dunklin County Museum.

In 1999 businessman Jim D. Morris gave the state land on Crowley’s Ridge that opened as Morris State Park in 2000. In Malden, the Bootheel Youth Museum won the National Medal for Museum and Library Service in 2012.