Visitors Guide to Kennett, Missouri
Dunklin County Museum
Kennett is the largest town and commercial hub of the Bootheel Region of Southeast Missouri. The Kennett area had been settled by the Delaware and Shawnee tribes at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century. Their settlement of the area came at the invitation of the Spanish, who controlled the territory at the time, in the hope they would become allies against the Osage and against American encroachment. The territory was transferred to the United States in 1803 as part of the Louisiana Purchase.
By the time Dunlin County was organized in 1845 the early settlers of the area had built a settlement and named it Chilletecaux, after a Delaware tribal chief who was living in the area at the time. Chilletecaux was chosen as Dunklin County’s seat and the town was platted in 1848. The town’s name was changed in 1849 to Butler as residents thought the name, Chilletecaux, too long and hard to pronounce. But the city encountered mail delivery problems due to the existence of another Missouri town named Butler and the fact that the neighboring county was also named Butler. The town was finally named Kennett in 1851, honoring, for no recorded reason, Luther Kennett, the mayor of St. Louis and railroad promoter. It may have been an attempt to influence Kennett to build a railroad to the town. While maps from 1852 to the late 1860s show proposed routes of the St. Louis & iron Mountain Railroad extending south from Pilot Knob, Kennett didn’t get rail access until the 1890s. The town's early history is obscured because a fire in 1872 destroyed the courthouse and all its records.
Ben Cash Memorial Conservation Area
In 1862, during the Civil War, Dunklin County adopted a resolution to secede from the Union. The county became known as the "Independent State of Dunklin." Union troops briefly occupied Kennett in1863, and guerrilla raiders constantly roamed the area. Up until that time Kennett had been steadily growing. When the war ended, however, the town lay in ruins with the courthouse, as well as dozens of other buildings, lying in piles of burned ashes. Kennett had to be almost entirely rebuilt.
Economic recovery didn’t start until the arrival of the railroad and the beginning of the Little River Drainage District around the turn of the 20th century. In 1892 the Little River Valley/Arkansas (Cotton Belt) Railroad line in 1892 laid track to and began serving Kennett. Within a year there were new brick shops on the south side of the downtown courthouse square, as well as four attractive new churches and a public school.
In the early 1900s the terrain of the county began to be transformed with the beginning of the Little River Drainage District. Planning for this massive project began in 1907 with work beginning in 1912. The project was finished in 1927 and created dikes, dams, and levees that turned 2 million acres of swampy and overflowed land in 7 counties in southeast Missouri that was deemed unfit for cultivation and inhabitation and nicknamed "Swampeast Missouri." into fertile farmland suitable for growing soybeans, wheat, corn, rice, and cotton. The rich soil in Dunklin County makes it the state's top cotton producer, and ranks it 10th nationally in the number of cotton bales harvested each year. Dunklin County also produces more watermelons and cantaloupes than any other county in the state.
Portions of the virgin swamps and bottomland forests have been preserved in the area at the Ben Cash Memorial State Wildlife Area just west of Kennett and Hornersville Swamp State Wildlife Area and Warbler Woods State Natural Area to the south of town. These remaining cypress-tupelo swamps, open marshes, flooded timberland and flooded rice fields attract waterfowl that migrate along the Mississippi River Flyway.
www.kennettmo.com - The official website of the Kennett Chamber of Commerce.
