Van Buren was settled as the seat of Ripley County, organized in 1833, and became the seat of Carter County when that county was organized from parts of Ripley and Shannon counties in 1859. Nearby Big Spring State Park, founded in 1924 and covering 4,582 acres, features the natural beauty of the largest single-orifice fresh water spring in the U.S. Big Spring has a maximum flow of 840 million gallons every 24 hours and a daily average of 250 million gallons, discharging about 175 tons of limestone in solution daily. At 433 feet above sea level, at the base of a 500-foot cliff, the spring gushes through an impeded opening from an underground streambed and flows 1,000 feet into Current River, a famed spring-formed, spring-fed Ozark fishing stream. Of the 69 springs in the U.S. having a daily flow of 64,600,000 gallons or more, 11 are in the Missouri Ozarks. During the Civil War, the Union Army of Southeast Missouri wintered in the area in 1862-63, and the Snider House west of town was the site of one of several skirmishes. Carter County, whose main industries are lumbering and recreation, is almost evenly divided by Current River. Called La Riviere Courante by early French trappers, the river has long been a highway and food source for the area. Early Indians found it attractive, and 36 villages and camps have been found in the area. Thousands of logs came down the river to nearby Chicopee in the 1890s and early 1900s during the lumbering boom. The town of Grandin to the south, once the lumbering center of Missouri, was laid out in 1888 by the Missouri Lumber and Mining Co. More than 100,000 acres of Carter County's virgin forest land were bought, and 15 to 20 thousand acres were harvested each year. From the mid-1890s to 1909, when the forest was depleted and the mills closed, production at Grandin's mills exceeded 60 million board feet of lumber a year. With the sawmills closed, Grandin and other mill towns in the area became like ghost towns. The area's natural forest resource is being restored through local, state, and national effort, and much of Carter County lies in Clark National Forest, founded in 1933-37.