Jacket, Missouri

Jacket (sometimes spelled Jackett) is an unincorporated community in the southeastern corner of McDonald County, Missouri. It is on Missouri Route KK about one-half mile north of the Missouri-Arkansas border and one mile west of the McDonald and Barry county border. The community is on the east bank of Big Sugar Creek.

The hilly and rocky Ozark Mountains land that would become Jacket had served for centuries as a home to native tribes, but by the mid-19th century the native people had left and were replaced by pioneers from eastern states and other parts of Missouri and Arkansas.

Though a lack of formal records has made the specifics difficult to trace, it is believed that the first pioneer to set up a permanent settlement in Jacket came to the area around 1840 or 1841 and was known as Clemons. Clemons built a water-powered corn cracker at the spot where Otter Creek, which flows north from Pea Ridge, runs into Big Sugar Creek. Both the names of Big Sugar Creek and Jacket are believed to have been coined around this time, according to local legend Big Sugar Creek was named for the groves of sugar maples that grew on its banks and Jacket was in reference to the colonies of yellow jacket wasps that were populous in the area.

Within a half dozen years of settling in the area, Clemons sold his corn cracker to Henry Schell (1810-1863) in 1846, a purchase which it was said was made possible by Schell selling a young slave boy for $400. Henry Schell had previously established the community of Shell Knob in Barry County, and he brought his wife, Elizabeth Yocum Schell, and their young children to make a claim on the large tracts of land that were open in that area for homesteading. He built a grist mill at the site of the corn cracker and had a house built west of the mill out of lumber that had been sawed at the Van Winkle mill in War Eagle, Arkansas. By the time of his murder by bushwhackers in 1863, he had amassed landholdings of 1,000 acres.

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