Featherby's Cove

A warm, calm inlet just off the rushing of the Eleven Point.

A Short History of the Irish Wilderness

When John Joseph Hogan, a young Irish Catholic priest and poet came to Missouri in 1857, he kept a firstperson journal of the suffering he saw everywhere he travelled--Irish children dying of starvation in rosinweed shanties outside St. Louis, Irishmen working as expendable labor laying railroad track for little or no pay near Rolla Hill, and African slaves manacled with iron hand-cuffs lying shoulder-to-shoulder on the boiler deck of a barge on the Missouri River. Hogan's mission to go into the interior of North Missouri and and "build a chapel or two" would not be simple.

When Father Hogan arranged purchase of land south of the urban turmoil, between the Eleven Point and Current Rivers in Ripley and Oregon counties, these destitute Irish Catholics had a chance to build their community. The land was partially tillable, and fresh water gushed endlessly from wondrous springs. Game was plenty, and in the forest wilderness they believed their children, church and community-at-large would be protected.

By the spring of 1859 there were about forty families on the newly acquired land, with more Catholics on the way. According to Hogan, these people were completely self-sufficient, and the "quiet solitariness of the place seemed to inspire devotion. Nowhere could the human soul so profoundly worship as in the depths of that leafy forest, beneath the swaying branches of the lofty oaks and pines, where solitude and the heart of man united in praise and wonder of the Great Creator." Vice was little known among them although they usually took their morning dram, or a drop with a friend, from a keg of the best, distilled by themselves or by some neighbor willing to share or barter on accommodating terms. Everyone smoked, men and women, young and old. The weed grew abundantly, and was usually the best tended crop on the place.

When the Civil War broke out, bushwhackers rushed into the area killing the settlers, burning and looting their dwellings, and running out whoever survived. Tragically, the area was never resettled by the Irish, and these immigrants' dream of a place in the wilderness they could call their own would come to naught. Near the site where their Catholic log-cabin church was erected, the Wilderness Free Will Baptist Church now stands. Most of the land is protected by the Mark Twain National Forest and is popularly known as the Irish Wilderness.

— Rev. Dwight Frizzell