Entries - County: Boone - Starting with S

South Lead Hill is a residential town located on State Highway 7 in northern Boone County. It is one of three communities that formed after the construction of Bull Shoals Dam flooded the location of the earlier town of Lead Hill (Boone County). Osage hunted and fished in northern Arkansas before the Louisiana Purchase added the land to the United States in 1803. A series of treaties moved the Osage west to Indian Territory (now the state of Oklahoma), but the northern part of Arkansas Territory remained sparsely settled for many years. Eli Dodson and William Cantrell both acquired land patents east of the location that would become South Lead Hill in 1854. In 1884, Robert Hollis purchased the land …

By late 1862, much of southern Missouri and northern Arkansas was overrun by large armies of both the Union and Confederacy. After they marched off to other campaigns outside the region, the area was left in the hands of smaller Federal and Confederate forces that were in frequent competition, both sides attempting to gain an advantage. Information-gathering incursions, such as this one initiated by Federal forces into Boone County in late 1862, were typical of the smaller military operations. On November 8, 1862, Captain Milton Burch of the Fourteenth Missouri Cavalry (Militia) was ordered to lead a detachment of Missouri militia from Ozark, Missouri, into northern Arkansas to gather information about Confederate forces in the area. The force of approximately …

The 1865 Affair at Sugar Loaf Prairie was a unique encounter between Union troops and guerrillas in extreme northern Arkansas in which a cave was used as a hiding place. On January 8, 1865, a scouting mission of twenty-five men of the Seventy-third Infantry Enrolled Missouri Militia under the command of Lieutenant Willis Kissel moved from Forsyth, Missouri, in an effort to look for two bands of guerrillas who were operating in the southern part of the state. Moving into Arkansas, the Federals learned from a local family that the guerrilla band under the command of Alfred Cook was hiding in a cave near Sugar Loaf Prairie about two miles away. Kissel captured Cook’s son, and the youth led the …