Missouri's Elephant Rocks State Park voted No. 3 of America's favorite natural landmarks

Elephant Rocks State Park in Missouri came in at No. 3 in a nation-wide survey ranking Americans' favorite natural landmarks.

Aqua Expeditions polled 3,113 United States residents on which local natural landmarks they would most like to visit. The top three were Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Niagara Falls and Elephant Rocks State Park.

Great Smoky Mountains National Park is on the border of North Carolina and Tennessee.

"Unsurprisingly, this destination is the most visited national park in America, having attracted more than 14.1 million visitors in 2021 alone," according to a news release from Aqua Expeditions. "It’s no wonder so many others aspire to join the visitor’s book and witness the sprawling natural landscape, along with its year-round wildflower blooms, abundant rivers, waterfalls and forests."

Niagara Falls, located on the Niagara River in New York State, has a gorgeous view of three waterfalls that can be seen from the Observation Tower at Prospect Point in the Niagara Falls State Park.

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Elephant Rocks State Park, about three and a half hours east of Springfield in Belleview, came in at third place.

Elephant Rocks State Park may have been an ancient quarry site

Brick Autry, an interpreter for both Elephant Rocks and Battle of Pilot Knob State Historic Site, told the News-Leader for a previous story that a pioneer by the name of Theodore Pease grew up in the area in the 1840s and recorded that the site was known as "the quarry even though there wasn't any quarry business yet." It may have even been an ancient quarry site, Autry added.

"It is one place in the United States where you can see land that became North America that goes back to 3 billion years ago," Autry said. "Our area is a little special area where ancient land was preserved and then pushed up along with the rest of the Ozarks, so that it's sort of like a little viewing area for early history of the Earth."

The boulders themselves are from erosion of volcanic magma, Autry explained.

"It cooled beneath the surface of the ground, and it cooled slowly enough to develop crystals into a rock that we call granite," Autry said. With lots of iron in that magma, the granite came out a pinkish color. "Over the years, it broke up into pieces and then, as it came up on the surface because of erosion, it eroded into globular, rounded boulders of pink granite."

Following the Civil War, railroads and other transportation routes were being repaired, and that's when German immigrant Peter Schneider entered the picture.

Schneider lived in St. Louis and worked for the Iron Mountain Railroad, which runs from the Gateway City (a nickname for St. Louis) to Pilot Knob. After the war, Schneider was able to acquire the land four miles north of Pilot Knob with all the pink granite and opened his quarry in 1871.

From the 1870s to early 20th century, there were four quarries, including the Irish-named Sheehan Quarry.

The monstrous boulders were never on the chopping block to be sold as quarry material due to how brittle they are, Autry said. The busy quarries used them mostly as tourist attractions. It wasn't until the late 19th century when circuses were traveling through the region that a tourist pointed out that some of the boulders resembled elephants, Autry said.

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The land went up for sale in the 1960s when John Brown, a head geologist for a mine near Park Hills, bought it.

"He bought the whole 200 acres at considerable cost to himself and then donated it to the state of Missouri," Autry told me.

The state added Elephant Rocks State Park to the list of parks in 1964, which was a revolutionary time not just for racial integration but also social integration, Autry said. Making the park accessible for disabled folks was a top priority.

"This was even before all the rules in architectural design," Autry said about about the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. "Missouri State Park was on the cutting edge of renovation and innovation and park planning."

What other natural landmarks would Americans like to visit?

The top 10 natural landmarks Americans would most like to visit, according to Aqua Expeditions:

• Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains National Park

• New York’s Niagara Falls

• Missouri’s Elephant Rocks

• Wyoming’s Yellowstone National Park

• California’s Redwood National and State Parks

• Hawaii’s Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park

• Hawaii’s Hanauma Bay

• Iowa's Pikes Peak State Park

• Arizona's The Grand Canyon

• Hawaii's Waikīkī Beach

The top 10 international landmarks Americans would most like to visit:

• The Galápagos Islands

• The Great Barrier Reef, Australia

• Giant’s Causeway, Northern Ireland

• Victoria Falls, Southern Africa

• Paricutin, Mexico

• Uluru, Australia

• The Amazon River, South America

• The Indonesian Islands

• The Mekong River, Asia

• Mount Kilimanjaro, Tanzania

Sara Karnes is an Outdoors Reporter with the Springfield News-Leader. Follow along with her adventures on Twitter and Instagram @Sara_Karnes. Got a story to tell? Email her at skarnes@springfi.gannett.com.

This article originally appeared on Springfield News-Leader: Missouri's Elephant Rocks State Park voted No. 3 in nation-wide survey