When the City of O'Fallon purchased Fort Zumwalt Park for $1 from the Missouri Department of Natural Resources in 1978, it acquired about 48 acres, the ruins of a War of 1812 settler fort, and a brick house built circa 1884-86. Before 1816, few people dared go west of St. Charles in present-day Missouri because there were no roads, the land was wilderness and Osage hunting grounds, and Native American attacks largely halted westward immigration despite the success of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Jacob Zumwalt and his family moved to this leading edge of the American frontier with the skills and tools of frontier life, drawing on experience shared with his brothers Adam, Christopher, George, John D., and Henry on the Kentucky frontier near Daniel Boone and his family. In 1782, Adam Zumwalt was at the Battle of Blue Licks in Kentucky, where Daniel Boone's son Israel was killed. After hearing that Spain was granting free land to settlers, the Boones and Zumwalts moved to present-day Missouri and received Spanish land grants in 1799, and Jacob Zumwalt's 300-acre grant included this site, where he built a log home that later became the area's first meeting place for Methodist services led by traveling ministers. During the War of 1812, which also extended into the Ohio and Mississippi River valleys, British support for Native Americans and attacks on American settlers led Missouri Territory frontiersmen such as the Zumwalts and Boones to turn their homes into settler forts. As many as 10 frontier families sheltered here from raids, while settlers organized volunteer companies, enlisted in the Missouri Rangers, and fought in raids and ambushes. Rebekah Heald, later associated with this place, survived the Massacre at Fort Dearborn near present-day Chicago, where Pottawatami warriors killed or captured Americans evacuating the fort, her husband Nathan Heald was badly wounded and captured, she was wounded several times, and her uncle William Wells was killed trying to protect her. Her captors dressed her wounds and eventually traded her to Chardonnis, who reunited her with her husband, and after three months and 1,907 miles they returned to Louisville, Kentucky. Although the Treaty of Ghent ended hostilities between Americans and the British in 1814, violence continued in Missouri Territory until peace treaties gathered by William Clark at Portage des Sioux in 1815 and additional treaties in 1816 brought the war to an end. For about a generation afterward, westward immigration passed through present-day O'Fallon and Dardenne Prairie over the Boones' Salt Lick Road, now Highway N. The nearby two-story house is linked to Zumwalt's Fort through Maj. Nathan Heald and Rebekah, who bought Jacob Zumwalt's farm in 1817. Their son Darius, born at Zumwalt's Fort in 1822, lived much of his life in the old log house, later gave land for a new Methodist church, helped start a school for young women, served in the Missouri legislature in 1856, and in 1886 moved his family into the brick house built on the hilltop overlooking the log house.