Arcadia Valley is rural area in Missouri located 80 miles south of St. Louis in the St. Francois Mountains of the Ozark Plateau. The valley includes of the towns of Arcadia, Ironton and Pilot Knob, all founded in the 19th century.
Arcadia Valley has been a non-indigenous settlement for over 300 years. It became a permanent settlement as a mining community, primarily mining iron and lead ore.
Arcadia Valley is known for its red brick Iron County courthouse, graceful antebellum homes and turn-of-the-20th-century mercantile buildings. It was a popular 19th century summer resort. During the Civil War, the valley was the site of a significant battle at Fort Davidson in Pilot Knob.
Elephant Rocks State Park is located in the valley. Johnson's Shut-Ins State Park and Taum Sauk State Park are nearby.
Famous quotes containing the words arcadia and/or valley:
“To value the tradition of, and the discipline required for, the craft of fiction seems today pointless. The real Arcadia is a lonely, mountainous plateau, overbouldered and strewn with the skulls of sheep slain for vellum and old bitten pinions that tried to be quills. It’s forty rough miles by mule from Athens, a city where there’s a fair, a movie house, cotton candy.”
—Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)
“How old the world is! I walk between two eternities.... What is my fleeting existence in comparison with that decaying rock, that valley digging its channel ever deeper, that forest that is tottering and those great masses above my head about to fall? I see the marble of tombs crumbling into dust; and yet I don’t want to die!”
—Denis Diderot (1713–1784)