Rush Historic Mining District

Rush Historic Mining District. From Ancient Indians to Zinc Miners. , Rush, and other Buffalo River valleys, is a story of the progression human occupation. In the hills and hollows around you is buried evidence of centuries of use., Ancient Indians once walked these banks and hills, leaving signs of their passing buried deep in layers laid on by ever- flooding waters. Artifacts from Archaic, Woodland, and Mississippian periods (about 8000 B.C.-1350 A.D.) have been found., In the 1840s and 1850s settlers penetrated the Rush valley and turned fertile bottomlands of creek and river into farms., Zinc ore was discovered in the early 1880s. Almost overnight Rush became the lodestar of the North Arkansas mineral region., Towns and mining companies sprouted, died, sprouted again with the rise and fall of mining economics, "New Town," a boom town of World War I, filled an area from Rush Creek to the present campground, while upstream at the Morning Star Mine the community of "Rush" greeted visitors to the valley., By the 1920s the boom of dynamite was heard less and less and remaining Rush residents returned to subsistence living. During World War II the once-proud ore concentrating mills were converted to scrap iron, signalling the end of the mining era., Rush's importance to Arkansas's mineral region and extensive mining period ruins earned Rush a place on the National Register of Historic Places. Abandoned buildings and old foundations tell of the once-bustling life of the valley.