00 Fire Tower Road

About This Property

AUCTION LISTING - List price is not indicative of Seller’s final reserve amount. This property is part of an online bidding event. This sale will be executed with a no-contingency contract provided by brokerage representing the Seller. See MLS Supplement Document for complete details. 80± acres of untouched white oak timber on Fire Tower Road, five miles south of Steelville in Crawford County, accessed by a 33-foot ingress/egress easement. Every acre is forested, and a walkthrough by Holzmueller Forestry Consulting this August turned up no evidence the timber has ever been harvested. The stand is dominated by white oak with post, red, and black oak mixed in, and roughly three-quarters of that white oak volume is already better than eighteen inches at breast height. The forester put the owner's share of the standing timber at approximately $50,000, or about $625 per acre, through a strategic harvest that captures value without wrecking the aesthetics or the habitat. Thick oak regeneration underneath means the next stand is already coming. Take the money now or let it keep growing, either way, that's real value sitting on the stump before you ever hang a stand. The ground lays mostly flat to gently rolling with about 15 acres of south facing slope on the west side that the forester called low commercial value, which is another way of saying it's exactly where deer bed and turkeys strut on a cold morning. An existing trail system gets a side-by-side to your stands without cutting new road. The tract also adjoins Keysville Towersite, an 80 acre MDC area where deer hunting is archery methods only. No rifle pressure pushing deer around next door during the November grind, that's a rare neighbor to have. Beyond the property line you're in the best recreation corridor in the state. Steelville, the Floating Capital of Missouri, is 5 miles up Route AA, with the Meramec River and Huzzah and Courtois creeks running nearby outfitters, gravel bars, and some of the finest smallmouth water in the Ozarks. Mark Twain National Forest, the Berryman Trail, and Dillard Mill are all close. And Chesterfield and the west St. Louis suburbs are roughly 85 miles northeast, about an hour and a half door to gate, putting an untouched 80± acre timber tract well inside Friday night range.

Meramec float country of clear water, gravel bars, and timber

Crawford County is prime Ozark float country, drained by the Meramec River and its clear tributaries the Courtois and Huzzah. The landscape runs to timbered hills, pine and hardwood ridges, and gravel-bottom valleys, with much of the county bordering Mark Twain National Forest. Recreational buyers prize the cold, spring-fed streams for canoeing and smallmouth fishing, while the heavy hardwood cover holds strong whitetail and turkey. Thin, rocky uplands keep the working ground in pasture, hay, and cattle rather than crops. With Steelville and Cuba as regional hubs and easy interstate access, tracts here suit a river retreat, a hunting camp against public land, or a cattle place with recreation built in.

Location