Now the site of a popular canoe access 12 miles upstream of Kickapoo State Park, the Higgensville Bridge was once in a town. About 150 years ago an enterprising New Yorker, Alonzo Higgens, paddled up the Middle Fork and stopped here where he figured the river was no longer navigable - an ideal starting point for wagon trains to strike out across the prairie to the west. So he founded Higgensville and ran ads in the New York papers to sell lots. Unfortunately another city eventually claimed the title "gateway to the west", and Higgensville has dwindled to merely a few houses and a pioneer cemetery today. Occasionally when the river level is high in the springtime, voyageurs in large "freighter" birchbark canoes remind us that the Middle Fork was probably used for transportation purposes during the fur trading days before the prairies were drained and railroads built.