Zincite, Missouri

One of the aspects of local or regional history that I've always found fascinating is learning about towns or communities that once flourished but that either no longer exist or are merely a shell of what they used to be. Jasper County, Missouri, has more than its share of such places because of its history as a mining district. A lot of places popped up during the mining boom of the late 1800s, flourished for a while, and then petered out when the ore was depleted. Zincite was one such place. I think I've probably mentioned Zincite previously at one time or another on this blog, but I don't think I've ever gone into much detail about it.
A mining camp called Belleville (aka Belville or Bellville) sprang up in the early 1880s about five miles northwest of Joplin. The camp was named after the mining superintendent who developed the land. However, when a town was laid out and a post office acquired, both were named Zincite, after the ore that was mined there. Zincite grew rapidly to a population of more than 1,000 people. In 1886 a newspaper called the Zincite Morning Star was started, and at one time the town boasted three fraternal lodges, two churches, several businesses, a playhouse with a seating capacity of 400 people, and a school. The town's heyday lasted about twenty years, before declining during the first decade of the 1900s. By the time Joel Livingston wrote his History of Jasper County in 1912, Zincite was "only a hamlet." I think the Zincite School lasted into the early 1950s, when residents voted to consolidate with Carl Junction, but Zincite as a town was pretty much nonexistent by then.
Where exactly was Zincite? Livingston gives the location as just southwest of "old Sherwood." Sherwood, which was wiped off the face of the map during the Civil War, was located at the intersection of present-day JJ Highway and Fir Road. Whether Livingston's description of Zincite's location is accurate or not depends on what one interprets "just" to mean. If one reads "just" to mean "adjacent to," then the description is misleading, but if "just" means a couple of miles away, it's a pretty accurate description. Zincite was, in fact, located on Turkey Creek about two or two and half miles southwest of old Sherwood. To access this area today, one would take Highway P west off JJ Highway or Malang Road north off Belle Center Road. If you take Malang Road north to Foxtrot Lane and then go almost as far north as you can go before the road dead-ends at Turkey Creek, you'll be near a place called the Old Haunted Belleville Cave, which functions today as a haunted house during Halloween season (or at least it did the last I knew). This cave pretty much marks the spot of old Zincite, although I think the town was primarily on the north side of Turkey Creek. Mining took place on both sides of the creek. 
I recently ran onto an 1887 article in the St. Louis Globe Democrat (you never know where things are going to turn up), which said the land around where Zincite later sprang up was actually worked briefly as a mining field in 1877 but that it was soon deserted and not worked again in earnest until the boom of the early 1800s. At the time of the Globe-Democrat article, Zincite was adding 200 tons of zinc ore a week to the Joplin mining district's output. By 1889, that output had increased to about 637,510 pounds or well over 300 tons. There were a few weeks during the boom when the Zincite mines led all the camps of the Joplin district.