Eminence was founded as the seat of Shannon County after the county was organized in 1841. First located north of the Current River, the town was burned during the Civil War by guerrilla bands who overran the area, and after the war it was laid out again in 1868 on Jack's Fork of the Current. Named for George "Pegleg" Shannon of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, Shannon County lies in Missouri's Big Springs Country, where more than five thousand square miles contain eleven of the sixty-nine U.S. springs of first magnitude, including Alley, Blue, and Welch in the county, and where three of Missouri's five ebb-and-flow springs are also located. In 1924 two state parks were established near Eminence: Alley Spring State Park, with an eighty million eight hundred thousand gallon spring, a cave, and a pioneer mill, and Round Spring State Park, where a spring gushes into a bowl eighty feet across and thirty feet high. Parts of the county are in Clark National Forest, established from 1933 to 1939, and west on Jack's Fork is the Missouri State Teachers Association resort, Bunker Hill. The county, first settled in the 1820s by pioneers from Kentucky and Tennessee, serves resort, lumbering, and livestock farming interests. It formed part of the region ceded by Osage tribes in 1808 and used by Shawnee and Delaware Indians until the 1820s. Missouri's first copper mine was opened nearby by Joseph Slater in 1837, though mining became only intermittent after Michigan's mines opened in 1846; iron was also mined for a time, and during World War II Missouri's only manganese mine was opened at Thorny Mount. Between the 1880s and the 1920s, big lumber companies harvested Shannon County's forests by the thousands of acres, and West Eminence, Winona, and Birch Tree were once booming lumber camps, though reforestation has been bringing timber back to the hills. Scenic points in the county include Blue Springs at Owls Bend of the Current River, Ebb-and-Flow Spring at the mouth of Jack's Fork, Welch Spring at Cedar Grove, and Sinkin' Creek in Horse Hollow.