Just south of downtown Eureka, Lions Park is named for the Eureka Lions Club and honors its community service and fundraising for the Eureka area; the club, chartered in 1950, helped establish the park’s athletic fields and has raised and donated over half a million dollars for the community and its parks, while Lions Clubs International, founded in 1917, has become the world’s largest service club organization, known especially for fighting blindness, aiding communities in disaster, and supporting children, schools, hunger relief, and environmental care. The Eureka area along the Meramec River near Flat Creek and the Big River has long been inhabited, first by Shawnee people and, by 1812, also by Delaware, Pawnee, Cherokee, Osage, and Kickapoo peoples, while the rivers served as transportation routes and the Meramec River Valley held strategic importance in the late 1700s and early 1800s. The area’s natural resources included Burlington Chert, quarried from local ridge tops and traded between 3000 and 600 BCE, and between 800 and 1400 CE two large market centers developed near the confluence of the Big River and the Meramec, where local trade connected Eureka to regions as distant as the Rocky Mountains, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Atlantic Coast. The Meramec River’s natural flooding has long enriched the fertile land along Flat Creek, supporting early cultivation of native starchy seed plants and later modern farming centered on corn; after the 1983 flood, eroded land along the river exposed Mississippian Period artifacts dating from 800 to 1400 CE, including a squirrel effigy pipe found with arrow points, axes, and spades on the Geggie family farm. Along Flat Creek, a preservation area protects creek banks and habitat for wildlife, birds, and native plants. The Meramec Greenway, established in 1975 to coordinate recovery of 108 miles of the lower Meramec River after years of abuse and neglect, has helped restore water quality and natural beauty and made more than 28,000 acres of public parks and conservation areas available, while Great Rivers Greenway, established in 2000 after passage of Proposition C, works toward a connected regional system from the Katy Trail in St. Charles to the Gateway Arch in downtown St. Louis.