Three centuries of mining

Under the ground

From Mine La Motte to cobalt

Madison County’s story starts underground. Around 1720, French colonists led by Philip François Renault, about 200 of them along with enslaved workers from Saint-Domingue, began mining lead at a site north of present-day Fredericktown. They named it for Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, the governor of French Louisiana, who had hoped the ground held silver. It didn’t, but Mine La Motte became one of the oldest European settlements west of the Mississippi; a historical marker there calls it the site of Missouri’s first lead mine. Its lead was still being turned into ammunition nearly 150 years later, in the Civil War.

Moses Austin mined lead in the area in the early 1800s, and by 1901 the state mine inspector counted more than 253 million pounds of lead taken from Mine La Motte, along with nickel and cobalt. The inspector claimed Mine La Motte alone supplied more nickel and cobalt than the rest of the United States combined. Within 20 miles of Fredericktown, miners have taken lead, iron, copper, silver, cobalt, nickel, zinc, and tungsten.

Cobalt came in bursts, from 1903 to 1910, 1917 to 1920, and 1944 to 1961, and rarely at a profit. From 1954 to 1961 the mines delivered 1,443 tons of cobalt under a federal contract, refined in Fredericktown. West of town, the Einstein Silver Mining Company worked a silver, tungsten, and lead mine from 1877 until 1946; its ruins now sit inside the Silver Mines Recreation Area.

Founding and early years

A French mine, an American county

Madison County was organized on December 14, 1818 and named for President James Madison, three years before Missouri became a state. By then the mines at Mine La Motte had been worked for nearly a century, and Fredericktown grew up a few miles south as the county seat.

After the mines

Public lands, a historic square, and new mining

Large-scale cobalt production ended in 1961. The mining landscape became part of the county’s draw: the Einstein mine’s grounds along the St. Francis River became the Silver Mines Recreation Area in the Mark Twain National Forest, and the Tiemann Shut-ins downstream, a private tourist attraction until 1979, became the Millstream Gardens Conservation Area. Downtown, the courthouse joined the National Register of Historic Places in 2000 and the square around it in 2009.

Mining hasn’t entirely left, either. The EPA lists the old mine sites as the Madison County Mines Superfund site, and in 2019 a company began reprocessing old tailings for cobalt, a metal now in demand for batteries. Recent years have been hard on Fredericktown: an EF3 tornado struck the city on October 24, 2021, and on October 30, 2024, a fire at a battery-recycling plant caused explosions and evacuations, and dead fish were later found in nearby waterways.