We Never Know Just What We’ll Find

I booked us into the campground at the Greenville Recreation Area because it had full hook ups and was only $12 a night for us.

As an Army Corps of Engineers campground it has the hoped for level, paved sites. In fact the whole campground is unusually flat, since we’re in the hills of southeast Missouri.

On my first walk with Matey I was surprised to come across what looked like a city sidewalk running along the campground road.

I soon discovered that the recreation area is built on the former site of Greenville, MO.

It has sidewalks running along streets that have become part of a bike trail.

And sidewalks that now just run through the woods.

It has street signs, but the streets are gone.

The campground shares space with old foundations…

and an old cemetery.

So what happened to Greenville?

This level site is on the floodplain of the St. Frances River. The flood of 1935 was the eighth major flood since the town was established in 1818. Ironically, when a flood control dam was started downriver in 1939 it was expected that the town would flood more often and to a greater extent as it would be within the high water pool of the newly created Wappapello Lake.

This is a piling for the bridge that now takes traffic on US 67 over the St. Frances River and over the entrance to the Greenville Recreation Area. If you look at the high water marks and dates that are painted here you can see that they were right. The highest mark before the dam was built was the flood of 1915, midway up the round part of the piling. If you look at the water depth on the house in the 1935 flood, you realize that the flood of 2011 would have completely covered every building in the town.

Except that in 1940 they moved the town two miles to higher ground. About 40 homes were moved. Other buildings were torn down and rebuilt.

It is still a small town.

But it still has the courthouse and remains the county seat of Wayne County, Missouri.

Its old site is left to be discovered by campers like us.