Van Meter State Park is a state park in the US state of Missouri. The park consists of 1,104.63 acres (447.03 ha) of hills, ravines, and bottomland along the Missouri River in Saline County in an area known locally as the Pinnacles, which for centuries were traversed by a Native American tribe known to the French settlers as “Oumessourit,” or Missouri Indians. The site contains remnants of an old Native American village and several burial mounds. The area's native history is interpreted in the park's cultural center through exhibits and murals.
Activities available at Van Meter include camping, hiking, and fishing in an 18-acre (7.3 ha) lake. Natural features include a fresh water marsh, fens, and bottomland and upland forests.
Famous quotes containing the words van, meter, state and/or park:
“This is The End—of the Beginning.”
—Rip Van Ronkel, and Robert A. Heinlein (1907–1988)
“His meter was bitter, and ironic and spectacular and inviting: so was life. There wasn’t much other life during those times than to what his pen paid the tribute of poetic tragic glamour and offered the reconciliation of the familiarities of tragedy.”
—Zelda Fitzgerald (1900–1948)
“Worn down by the hoofs of millions of half-wild Texas cattle driven along it to the railheads in Kansas, the trail was a bare, brown, dusty strip hundreds of miles long, lined with the bleaching bones of longhorns and cow ponies. Here and there a broken-down chuck wagon or a small mound marking the grave of some cowhand buried by his partners “on the lone prairie” gave evidence to the hardships of the journey.”
—For the State of Kansas, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“Therefore awake! make haste, I say,
And let us, without staying,
All in our gowns of green so gay
Into the Park a-maying!”
—Unknown. Sister, Awake! (L. 9–12)