Sullivan, Missouri: Daniel Boone's Tip

Stephen and Dorcas Sullivan migrated from South Carolina after hearing about the Meramec River country, a story tradition credits to Daniel Boone. In June of eighteen fifty-six they bought one hundred sixty-nine acres and laid out a village. The local postmaster initially named it Mount Helicon, after a mountain in ancient Greece, but that fanciful label lasted only three years.

In eighteen fifty-nine the town was rechristened Sullivan, and Stephen filed a plat with fifty lots. A few miles east, the Meramec Caverns had been forming underground for four hundred million years and opened to the public in nineteen thirty-five, giving Sullivan a tourism anchor that drew Route Sixty-Six travelers for generations. The town today straddles the Franklin and Crawford county line and is the launching point for one of the Ozarks' most visited cave systems.