Valles Mines, Missouri, U S A
Founded in 1749 by Francois Valle in the French Upper Louisiana before Lewis and Clark. 275 years later the Valle Mining Company's 4000+ acre property every year absorbs 21,000 tons of carbon dioxide and generates
14,000 tons of oxygen, enough to meet the needs of 63,000 people. [USDA Forest Facts]
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Collection Temporarily Housed in The Company Store

In The Valley Where Time Stands Still


The Lost History Museum BEFORE. The 1749 Valles' family log settlement house. Repairs continue.
Photo credit: Patrick McCarthy

14117 Valles Mines School Road 63087

Open by appointment. Please call first.

Contact Info:
Steve Frazier
636-551-8705
HistorianSteve@Gmail.com
The Valles Mines General Store Building, 
                    built
after the first building was sucked 
                    up by a tornado. [On Left] Temporary home of the Lost History Collection in the General Store across the parking lot.
Pictured, the George & Martha Washington Brooks Log House, located uphill behind the parking lot.

See Back in Time to...1776

Why Mine? To Make Musket Balls, Of Course

With galena nuggets you could melt down your pocket change

With galena nuggets you could melt down your pocket change to make rifle balls. Valles Mines lead was so pure that its only impurity was silver. Our lead was shipped back East and, as of the Declaration of Independence, smuggled back, to Boston, New York and Philadelphia for the Revolutionary War and our Continental Army.

To see back through Time to an everyday event for colonial riflemen and women, watch the scene in the movie The Patriot where Mel Gibson melts down his son's lead toy soldiers, pouring the molten lead into a handheld bullet mold, a common household tool in those days. Valles Mines' galena nuggets melted exactly like that. Battle scenes in that time period documented how they battled at that time, just like in the French and Indian War that raged just before our American Revolution, where Mel Gibson's character had become so famous. When George Washington ordered the cannons from Fort Ticonderoga be hauled 300 miles to save the Continental Army, they had been left there at the Fort after the French and Indian War.

Just a few years before, when Francois Valle sent his sons and Ste Genevieve's militia, all French loyalists, and a ton of cannon balls and rifle balls, all made of of Valles Mines' lead They fought off, as only 300 men, a British war party of 1000 Iroquois Indians raiding nearby Fort San Carlos, they saved that Spanish outpost forever -- which you may know now as St Louis, Missouri.