Markets, Merchants, and Manufacturers

Chapter 5 presents a side of the antebellum Ozark experience often overlooked in the popular imagination. Connecting the Ozarks to broader national markets were country mercantiles and small-town stores, lead and iron mines and furnaces, sawmills, grist mills, tanneries, and factories for the manufacture of tobacco products, whiskey, and other items. Providing transportation and shipping within the region were steamboats on the White, Gasconade, and other navigable streams, a growing network of roads crisscrossing the Ozarks, and at the very end of the antebellum era two railroad lines that snaked their way from St. Louis into the northern reaches of the region.