Potosi, named for the famous South American silver mine, was established by Moses Austin as the seat of Washington County, organized in 1813. Austin came here in 1797 after receiving a 3 square mile Spanish land grant that included the Mine à Breton lead diggings opened about 1773 by Francois Azor, nicknamed Breton. Under Moses Austin, lead, which brought Missouri’s first settlers, became the base of its first major industry; here he sank the first mine shaft in Missouri, built the first reverberatory furnace west of the Mississippi, and founded Herculaneum to the east as a lead depot. Austin died soon after the Spanish governor of Texas granted his petition to settle 300 American families there, and his son Stephen carried out the venture. In the Presbyterian Cemetery here, under a concrete vault, lie Moses and his wife, Maria Brown Austin. Stephen Austin, known as the Father of Texas, spent his boyhood here, and John Rice Jones, State Supreme Court judge from 1820 to 1824, and Daniel Dunklin, governor from 1832 to 1836, also lived here. Potosi had the second academy in Missouri in 1817 and became the center for one of the largest barite, or tiff, mining areas in the U.S., serving a mining, farming, and lumbering county. In 1819, explorer Henry R. Schoolcraft listed 28 mines in the county, where French gold and silver seekers had early discovered lead. Ore is now mined in the Indian Creek area, and northward lies Old Mines, a French village reminiscent of Missouri’s colonial days, where the first mine was opened in 1726 by Philip Renault. The area also includes Cannon’s Mines with its primitive furnace and Shibboleth Mine, opened by John Smith T., a speculator from Tennessee. Near Potosi, Springfield Iron Furnace opened in 1823. To the south in Bellevue Valley, first settled in 1807 by Scotch-Irish pioneers from North Carolina, the first Presbyterian Church west of the Mississippi was organized in 1816, and the Cherokee Trail of Tears passed through the valley in 1837. Near town is historic Bellevue Presbyterian Cemetery, Washington State Park with its Indian petroglyphs on Big River, and at Irondale is a Boy Scout Camp.