Elephant Rocks State Park

The elephants are core stones. About 1.5 billion years ago magma cooled slowly deep underground into red granite. As erosion stripped away the rock above, the granite cracked along horizontal and vertical joints into huge blocks, and water working down the cracks rotted their edges and rounded them while they were still buried. When the loose grit washed out, the rounded boulders were left standing end to end on the bedrock, a landform geologists call a tor. The park calls this one the finest in Missouri. The largest, Dumbo, is 27 feet tall, 34 feet long and 17 feet wide and weighs about 680 tons. Frost and the weak acid of lichens keep working on them, and on the crest they have hollowed shallow basins called solution pans.

The granite was money. Just outside the park, the oldest recorded commercial granite quarry in Missouri opened in 1869 and supplied red facing stone for the piers of the Eads Bridge in St. Louis, then, from 1880 to 1900, millions of paving blocks for the levee and downtown streets. Block makers hammered flawed stone into shoebox-sized blocks that sold for about 8 cents each, so a good worker making 50 a day earned $4. Graniteville, built and owned by the quarry company, had more than 700 people around 1890, and a few granite buildings still stand.

The paved Braille Trail, designed for visitors with visual and physical disabilities, loops through the rocks, and a spur leads to the ruins of the railroad engine house.