Those who have seen it are universally effusive about it, wearing out every superlative in Webster’s dictionary, attempting a description.

“Gem.”

“Jewel.”

“The finest ... the showiest ... the most beautiful.”

Frank Oberle, who has traveled the United States photographing and studying grasslands, says there is little like Coyne Prairie. So when the chance came to grab the Dade County remnant, Oberle, who lives near Kirksville, leaned on his contacts at the Missouri Prairie Foundation with a message: Damn the torpedoes; full speed ahead.

“He told our president he didn’t care what we had to pay for it,” said Justin Johnson, development director for the Missouri Prairie Foundation.

Now the foundation, which has been working to preserve prairies in the region for 40 years, hopes to raise $96,000 to buy Coyne.

“Coyne, when it is in full bloom, is probably the showiest prairie in the state,” Johnson said. “We believe it is the most beautiful 80 acres in the state. It is such a powerfully visual thing.”

“Coyne Prairie is pretty much a pure, pristine prairie,” added Oberle.

He ranks it and other remnants of prairie in Southwest Missouri highest on his list of favorite places.

“The prairies of Southwest Missouri are the rarest of all prairies in North America,” he said. The region’s deep soils, which support so much diversity, which feed such luxuriant displays of color and form, also make them vulnerable to the plow, and are the reason so little of it now exists.

“I somehow think of them as the Garden of Eden. ... I can’t imagine something being better than those prairies.”

Like individual puzzle pieces that remain long after adjoining parts have been lost, Southwest Missouri is dotted with bits and pieces of preserved prairie, tens of thousands of acres in bits ranging from 40- and 80-acre tracts up to a few thousand acres, in places such as Prairie State Park near Liberal.



Reminders of Ireland

Oberle likened the surviving prairie tracts to Rembrandts in the attic of Southwest Missouri, Johnson said. But the photos Oberle has taken at Coyne and elsewhere make them look more like Monets.

The prairies may be important as disappearing landscapes — “a little slice of what used to be here,” Oberle said — but their value goes beyond aesthetics.

“It is right in the middle of what we call a prairie chicken focus area,” said Johnson, referring specifically to what is known as the Stony Point Focus Area, about 20,000 acres of private and public land that the foundation and other groups work to manage with a goal of restoring habitat for prairie species, and in particular prairie chickens.

The 80-acre Coyne tract is next to the foundation’s 160-acre Penn-Sylvania tract. That, and an adjacent 80 acres that will remain in private hands, can be managed as one 320-acre block, a half-section window into a time when much of Southwest Missouri was bathed in the same wildflowers and bluestem grasses. And, about 1,000 protected acres of prairie are nearby.

Patrick Snadon said his ancestor Patrick Coyne — who saw the ugliest landscapes of the country at Shiloh and Vicksburg, at Chattanooga and marching through Georgia — used his Civil War mustering-out pay to begin buying land in Dade County. The area, according to family tradition, reminded Coyne of Ireland.

“It has been in my mother’s family since 1892,” Snadon said of the Coyne Prairie.

He joked that his Irish-Catholic ancestor never indulged in the work ethic of his Protestant neighbors who industriously converted every tillable acre into productive farmland and who criticized Coyne’s own lack of initiative.

Somehow, that ethic survived through subsequent generations, down to Snadon and his brother, who owns the nearby 80 acres.

“We hayed it every summer,” said Snadon, who agreed to sell the tract to the Missouri Prairie Foundation.

His family, he said, had an appreciation for the beauty of the prairie but also understood its intrinsic agricultural value, providing hay for livestock even during times of hard drought.

“The secret was they hayed it at the most once a year and never grazed it,” Snadon said of Coyne. Snadon now teaches architecture and interior design at the University of Cincinnati.

That’s how most prairie remnants in the area survived, generation to generation, swept out of the mainstream of row-crop agriculture, Oberle said. Even some of the prairies that were never plowed were still overworked — compromised by too much haying or grazing. And, it can cost just as much, if not more, per acre to reseed them, he said.

Not so with Coyne.

“We are basically buying a gem that is already ready to go,” Johnson said.



Prairie Estates?

But the surviving parcels still can be lost.

Johnson remembers not long ago watching 160 acres of prairie being plowed for beans. The farmer, he said, had no incentive for keeping it in grass, but as soon as it was plowed and planted, he was eligible for subsidies.

Lowell Pugh of Golden City is another fan of the grasslands in the region. His family sold 320 acres to the Missouri Prairie Foundation decades ago. The group acquired an adjacent 100 acres, then an additional 200, and then worked out a management agreement with a nearby landowner. Now, about 1,100 acres are protected.

Pugh said that original 320-acre tract supports a floral inventory of 345 different species, including some plants that are considered rare and endangered.

“The plant biodiversity might be just as important as the prairie chicken,” Pugh said.

But like others, he said more may be lost than locked away.

“I just noticed, down Mount Vernon way, some beautiful prairie sprouting houses, especially nice prairie along Highway 39,” he said. “Of course, I think they called it Prairie Estates.”



Andy Ostmeyer writes for The Joplin (Mo.) Globe.





Want to see the prairie?

Wildflower hikes are scheduled for 10 a.m. on May 6, June 3 and July 1 at Prairie State Park, near Liberal. Hikers are to meet at the visitors center, dress appropriate for the weather, and bring water and bug repellent.

The Missouri Prairie Foundation will have a prairie tour and camping event May 20 at Coyne Prairie. Penn-Sylvania Prairie is two miles west of Highway 97 on Route E in Dade County, then south one-half mile on the gravel road. Coyne Prairie is on Route E, about eight miles due west of Stockton Reservoir. Information: Justin Johnson, (888) 843-6739.

The Missouri Department of Conservation will have a Prairie Walk at 6 p.m. Tuesday, June 20, to tour a local prairie. Details: (417) 629-3423.



Want to help?

To learn more about the Missouri Prairie Foundation, or to join and help with its preservation of Coyne Prairie, go to www.moprairie.org.



Some nearby prairie parcels



Osage Prairie Conservation Area, in Vernon County, is six miles south of Nevada on U.S. Highway 71, then 1.5 miles west on an unnamed gravel road and a half-mile south on another unnamed road. The 1,547-acre site includes the 615-acre Osage Prairie Natural Area.

Wah-Sha-She Prairie is northwest of Joplin on Jasper County Route M, a mile east of U.S. Highway 171. This is a 160-acre native prairie with a small wetlands. It is a designated natural area. Native grasses and wildflowers are diverse and abundant.

Diamond Grove Prairie Conservation Area is four miles west of Diamond on Newton County Route V, then 1.25 miles north on a gravel road marked with a sign. The 852-acre site contains the 570-acre Diamond Grove Prairie Natural Area.

Prairie State Park is at 128 N.W. 150th Lane near Liberal in Barton County. The park, at nearly 4,000 acres, preserves Missouri’s largest remaining tallgrass prairie. Bison and elk have been restored to the park.

Sources: Missouri departments of Conservation and Natural Resources