Rush and other Buffalo River valleys preserve evidence of a long progression of human occupation. Ancient Indians once used these banks and hills, leaving artifacts from the Archaic, Woodland, and Mississippian periods, about 8000 B.C. to 1350 A.D., buried in layers left by repeated flooding. In the 1840s and 1850s, settlers moved into the Rush valley and turned fertile creek and river bottomlands into farms. After zinc ore was discovered in the early 1880s, Rush quickly became the lodestar of the North Arkansas mineral region. Towns and mining companies repeatedly appeared and disappeared with changing mining economics. During World War I, "New Town" spread from Rush Creek to the present campground, while the community of "Rush" stood upstream at the Morning Star Mine to greet visitors to the valley. By the 1920s, mining had declined and many remaining residents returned to subsistence living. During World War II, the ore concentrating mills were converted to scrap iron, ending the mining era. Rush's importance to Arkansas's mineral region and its extensive mining-period ruins later earned it a place on the National Register of Historic Places, and abandoned buildings and old foundations still reflect the valley's once-bustling life.