Crawford County No county building code, and no authority to adopt one

Barndominium Builders in Crawford County, MO

Crawford County is float-stream country. The Meramec, the Huzzah and the Courtois run through it, Onondaga Cave at Leasburg is a National Natural Landmark, and the whole of it sits on I-44 inside ninety minutes of St. Louis. That combination — cheap wooded acreage, canoe outfitters, weekend buyers and a metro within an easy drive — is what makes this a barndominium market rather than simply a rural one. The land data says the same thing in colder terms: 581 farms, 194,055 acres in farms, an average holding of 334 acres, and 62,668 of those acres carried as woodland. Land in farms is up 21 percent since 2017 while the number of farms fell 7 percent, which is what a recreational-acreage market looks like in an agricultural census. The regulatory answer here is unusual, and it is worth getting right before you buy. Crawford County is a county of the third classification. RSMo 64.170 empowers only counties of the first and second classification to control construction and issue building permits, so the county commission has no power to adopt a residential code, no county building permit to issue and no house to inspect. Its own published service list runs the County Clerk, assessment and collection, the Recorder of Deeds, the Circuit Court, the Treasurer, the Health Department, two road districts and the Sheriff — and stops there. That is not the end of it, though, and this is where Crawford differs from most of the counties around it. All four registered fire services in the county are Chapter 321 fire protection districts, and two of them regulate construction under RSMo 321.220(12). The Cuba Community Fire Protection District adopted the 2018 International Building Code and the 2018 International Fire Code by ordinance in December 2021, charges eight cents a square foot with a $150 minimum, and says its building ordinance reaches the unincorporated portions of Crawford County as well as the city of Cuba. The Bourbon Fire Protection District adopted the 2018 International Fire Code in 2021 and requires a building permit, plan review and an on-site inspection for new commercial construction. Neither district adopted a residential code, and the statute that lets them act bars them from requiring permits for farm buildings — so the question on any particular tract is which district it falls in and what the fire marshal says the district's code reaches. Inside the towns the answer changes again, and it changes twice. Cuba adopted the 2009 family of ICC codes; the city of Sullivan, whose limits reach across the Franklin County line into Crawford, adopted the 2018 International Residential Code with a filled-in design table. Three code generations inside one county line, and the largest share of the county's people — roughly two in three — living under none of them. What is left as the real gate is water and ground. The Crawford County Health Department in Steelville is the onsite wastewater permitting authority and holds an ordinance of its own, so the septic permit is the document that actually governs a build here. And the ground is karst: the state's inventory maps 92 sinkholes inside the county boundary. What that karst does not mean is shallow rock. Measured against the county's own soil survey, lithic and paralithic bedrock lies within about twenty inches on only 2.7 percent of the survey area. The constraints that bite are chert gravel, slope and a fragipan, not rock at the footing.

Crawford County at a glance

County: Crawford County
Population: 22,808
ZIP codes: 65565, 65453, 65441, 65535, 65456, 65449, 65446, 65586, 63080
Site visits: First site visits anywhere between Sullivan, Bourbon, Cuba, Leasburg and Steelville, usually within the week

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Building conditions in Crawford County

Missouri sets no residential building code and no statewide way of adopting one, so the first question on any parcel is not what the code says — it is whether there is one. Only counties of the first and second classification may adopt a building code at all, and classification is set by assessed valuation rather than population, so a small county can hold the power while a much larger one does not. Zoning is a separate power with its own answer, granted only after a vote of the people and repealable by another. What changes from one jurisdiction to the next is whether the work is inspected, who issues the permit, what that office charges, how the parcel is zoned, and the design figures your drawings have to satisfy.

Build conditions for Crawford County, drawn from the sourced facts on this page. Every figure above is cited in the quick-facts panel below, with its source and vintage.

The county is not permitted to have a building code

RSMo 64.170(1) empowers 'the county commission in all counties of the first and second classification' to control construction, provide for the issuance of building permits and inspect the work. Crawford County is a county of the third classification, one of the 89 in that class on the Missouri Association of Counties list published in May 2025, so the section does not reach it. That is not a policy the commission chose and could reverse next year; classification is set by assessed valuation under RSMo 48.020, and while it stands there is no county building code, no county building permit and no county inspection of a house. The county's own published service list is the other half of the proof — County Clerk, assessment and collection, Recorder of Deeds, Circuit Court, Treasurer, Health Department, two road districts and the Sheriff. There is no building department on it and no permits counter, and the county website returns nothing at all for 'zoning' or 'building permit'.

RSMo 64.170 (Effective 28 Aug 2008) and RSMo 48.020 (Effective 28 Aug 2026), rendered from revisor.mo.gov/main/OneSection.aspx 8 Sep 2026; Missouri Association of Counties, 'Missouri Counties by Classification', published May 2025, CLASS 3 block (total 89); Crawford County service list, crawfordcountymo.net/service-list/, read 8 Sep 2026

Two fire protection districts here issue building permits

The Missouri Division of Fire Safety's Fire Departments by County report lists four registered services in Crawford County, and every one is a Chapter 321 fire protection district: Bourbon, Cuba Community, Leasburg and Steelville. Two of them regulate construction. The Cuba Community Fire Protection District adopted the 2018 International Building Code by its Ordinance 21-02 and the 2018 International Fire Code by Ordinance 21-01, both enacted 14 December 2021 and in force from 12:01 a.m. on 1 January 2022, citing Chapter 321 RSMo and section 321.220(12) as the source of the power. Ordinance 21-02 states that it is effective 'for all portions of the Cuba Community Fire Protection District including those portions of Crawford County, Missouri and the City of Cuba, Missouri.' Its permit fee is eight cents a square foot with a $150 minimum, $25 for an occupancy permit, $50 for an additional inspection and $200 for starting construction without one. The Bourbon Fire Protection District says on its own fire prevention page that its board passed a 2021 ordinance adopting the 2018 International Fire Code with a fee schedule, and that it 'requires a Building permit for all new commercial business construction,' with the fire marshal completing an on-site inspection and plan review before a permit issues.

Missouri Division of Fire Safety, Fire Departments by County report generated 8 Sep 2026 from apps1.mo.gov/fsreg (Crawford: Bourbon FPD 02803, Cuba Community FPD 02804, Steelville FPD 02805, Leasburg FPD 02806); Cuba Community Fire Protection District Ordinances 21-01 and 21-02, enacted 14 Dec 2021, effective 1 Jan 2022, read from cubamofire.com 8 Sep 2026; Bourbon Fire Protection District fire prevention page and building permit application, bourbonfpd.com, read 8 Sep 2026

What those district codes reach — and what they deliberately do not

Both districts adopted building and fire codes, not a residential code, and the Cuba ordinance is unusually explicit about the limits of its own remit. Its section 2 deletes the words 'structural strength', 'stability sanitation', 'adequate light and ventilation' and 'energy conservation' from the code's statement of intent, renames the whole instrument 'The Fire Building Code of the Cuba Community Fire Protection District, Missouri', and substitutes 'Fire Marshal' for 'Building Official' everywhere the code says it. It adopts Appendix H, Patio Covers, and expressly excludes Appendix C, Group U — Agricultural Buildings. RSMo 321.220(12) then adds a statutory floor under all of it: a district's fire protection and fire prevention ordinances 'shall not be exercised so as to impose regulations or to require permits with respect to the erection, maintenance, repair, alteration, or extension of farm buildings or farm structures.' And RSMo 321.228 works the other way inside a town — where a city adopts and enforces a residential construction regulatory system, a district inside it is 'without power, authority, or privilege to enforce or implement' one, though it keeps final say on hydrants, hydrant flow rates and fire lanes, may inspect the alteration or repair of a one- or two-family dwelling, and may not charge for either. Which side of those lines a particular building falls on is a question for the district's fire marshal, by address.

Cuba Community Fire Protection District Ordinance 21-02 §§ 1–2, enacted 14 Dec 2021, read from cubamofire.com 8 Sep 2026 and re-read from an independent navigation the same day; RSMo 321.220 (Effective 28 Aug 2025) and RSMo 321.228 (Effective 28 Aug 2012), rendered from revisor.mo.gov/main/OneSection.aspx 8 Sep 2026

The septic permit is the document that actually governs a build here

The Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services names the Crawford County Health Department at 202 W. Main St. in Steelville as the onsite wastewater construction permitting authority for this county, and records the Authority Type as Ordinance — the county holds its own wastewater ordinance rather than administering the state programme under contract or leaving it to the state. DHSS says so in its own words on the same page: this county 'has their own Onsite Wastewater Ordinance and may have additional requirements beyond the state minimum construction standards.' That matters because of what RSMo 701.031 otherwise does. The statute excludes the owner of a single-family residence lot of three acres or more from the state onsite programme, provided every point of the system sits more than ten feet from any adjoining property line and no effluent leaves the parcel — which on recreational acreage is most parcels. But RSMo 701.047 lets a county adopt minimum standards more restrictive than the state's, and Crawford is recorded as having done exactly that. So the three-acre argument is not a safe assumption in this county; the health department is the office to ask, before the ground is bought.

Missouri DHSS onsite wastewater construction permit process county selector, health.mo.gov/business-professionals/onsite-wastewater-treatment/owts-construction-permit-process?county=Crawford, read 8 Sep 2026 (Agency: Crawford County Health Department; Authority Type: Ordinance; 202 W. Main St., Steelville, MO 65565; (573) 775-2555); RSMo 701.031 (Effective 28 Aug 2005) and RSMo 701.047 (Effective 28 Aug 1994), rendered from revisor.mo.gov 8 Sep 2026

Real karst, but the bedrock is not where you would guess

The Department of Natural Resources sinkhole inventory holds 92 sinkhole points inside the Crawford County boundary — a genuinely karsted county on the Salem Plateau, with Onondaga Cave a National Natural Landmark at Leasburg and the Meramec and Huzzah running through it. It is not the worst of it: neighbouring Dent County carries 492 in the same dataset and Phelps 247, while Franklin has 37 and Washington 22. What the karst here does not mean is rock at footing depth. Measured against the county's own published soil survey, lithic and paralithic bedrock lies within 51 centimetres — about twenty inches — on 12,891 component-weighted acres, which is 2.7 percent of the 475,872-acre survey area; within 102 centimetres, about forty inches, it is 23.1 percent. What does govern foundations is the chert and the slope. The four largest soil components are Alred, Rueter, Bender and Goss, the largest single map unit in the county is 'Alred-Rueter complex, 15 to 35 percent slopes, very stony' at 46,744 acres, components whose slope class starts at 15 percent cover 173,665 acres — 36.5 percent of the survey — and a fragipan is mapped on 85,221 acres at depths of 41 to 97 centimetres. So the real questions on a Crawford County pad are gravel, grade and a dense subsoil layer, plus whether a closed depression sits anywhere near the drainfield.

Missouri DNR sinkhole layer, gis.dnr.mo.gov/host/rest/services/geology/sinkholes/MapServer layer 1, queried 8 Sep 2026 by point-in-polygon against the Census TIGERweb 2026 county boundary for STATE 29 COUNTY 055 (method validated the same day against Greene 1,471, Pulaski 138 and Camden 91); USDA-NRCS Soil Data Access, survey area MO055 Crawford County, Missouri, survey version 31 last refreshed 2 Sep 2025, queried 8 Sep 2026 — total 475,872 map-unit acres across 82 map units; bedrock figure is corestrictions.resdept_r, which is in CENTIMETRES, filtered to reskind 'Lithic bedrock' and 'Paralithic bedrock', de-duplicated to one MIN(resdept_r) per cokey, weighted by mapunit.muacres x comppct_r/100, threshold 51 cm = 20.1 in giving 12,890.96 acres (2.709%) and threshold 102 cm = 40.2 in giving 110,007.85 acres (23.12%)

The only adopted design table with ground inside this county

No Crawford County instrument publishes a design wind speed, a ground snow load or a frost depth, because the county has no code to publish one in. One jurisdiction with territory inside the county does. The city of Sullivan, whose limits straddle the Franklin–Crawford line with 1,502 of its 6,925 residents on the Crawford side, adopted the 2018 International Residential Code by Ordinance No. 3823 on 20 November 2018 and amended Section R301.2 to insert its own table: ground snow load 20 psf, wind design speed 115 mph, Seismic Design Category C, weathering severe, frost line depth 30 inches, termite moderate to heavy, winter design temperature 0 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit, no ice barrier underlayment required, air freezing index 767, mean annual temperature 55.3, and flood hazard keyed to the FIRM of 18 October 2011 with a later revision of 9 January 2014. That last figure cross-checks: the federal community status book gives the city of Sullivan a currently effective map date of 18 October 2011. Two cautions belong with the numbers. They are Sullivan's, adopted for permits inside Sullivan, and they are not the county's. And the seismic category is one of the places where an adopted figure and the current national data openly disagree — Sullivan adopts C, while the USGS ASCE 7-16 service returns D at every point tested in this county.

City of Sullivan Code §§ 500.190–500.210, Ord. No. 3823, 11-20-2018, codified text current through legislation of 06-02-2026, read at ecode360.com/28373626 8 Sep 2026 (page title verified 'Article VII: International Residential Code - City of Sullivan, MO'); Census Vintage 2024 sub-county estimates sub-est2024_29.csv, Sullivan city (pt.) Crawford 1,502 and Franklin 5,423; OpenFEMA NfipCommunityStatusBook v1, community 290136, retrieved 8 Sep 2026; USGS ASCE 7-16 building-codes service, /ws/building-codes/asce7-16/calculate, five points queried 8 Sep 2026, payload request.status 'success'

Also worth knowing before you build in Crawford County

Cuba adopted the 2009 codes, and caps a detached garage at 1,200 square feet: Section 500.010 of Cuba's code, as it stands after Ordinance No. 1182 of 5 November 2020, adopts the 2009 International Building, Residential, Fire, Energy Conservation, Plumbing, Mechanical, Fuel Gas, Property Maintenance and Zoning codes together with the 2008 NFPA National Electrical Code, under the RSMo 67.280 power to incorporate technical codes by reference. The city's amendments to those codes are recorded as being on file in the city office rather than printed in the code, so Cuba publishes no design table of its own; the word 'frost' appears once in the whole code, in the mobile home park chapter. On the zoning side Cuba is the sharpest instrument in the county for anyone who wants a shop as well as a house. Section 400.1030.A.1 allows one detached garage or covered carport per residential structure in the R-1 district, sized at 250 square feet for each 3,000 square feet of lot area, and then states that 'in no event shall the garage or carport area exceed a total of twelve hundred (1,200) square feet' — a ratio to lot size with a hard ceiling that no amount of extra land will lift. Section 400.970 adds that an accessory structure in a rear yard may not cover more than 30 percent of the required rear yard area. What Cuba does not do is restrict what the building is made of: the word 'corrugated' does not appear anywhere in its code, 'metal' appears only in the scrap-metal, metal-tired-vehicle and culvert provisions, and there is no minimum roof pitch, no eave requirement and no design review of exterior materials.
Sullivan deletes the energy testing and keeps the solid-rock footing: Sullivan's adoption of the 2018 International Residential Code came with more than fifty amendments, and several of them matter to a steel-skinned building. The city deletes Chapter 11, Energy Efficiency, in its entirety and replaces it with Chapter 11 of the 2009 International Residential Code, then deletes the blower-door testing option at N1102.4.2.1 and the duct tightness testing at N1103.2.2, both the post-construction and the rough-in test. It rewrites R403.1 so that all exterior walls are supported on continuous solid or fully grouted masonry or concrete footings, or another approved structural system, on undisturbed natural soil or engineered fill; deletes the model footing tables and figures and substitutes its own, 8 inches by 24 inches for one and two storeys and 10 by 24 for three, good for foundation walls up to ten feet with anything taller requiring a designed footing. It keeps 'erected on solid rock' as one of the four permitted frost protection methods at R403.1.4.1 — a live provision in the codified text, not a repealed one — and exempts free-standing accessory structures of 200 square feet or less with an eave height of ten feet or less from frost protection entirely. R105.2 exempts the same 200-square-foot detached accessory building from needing a permit at all, and a new R106.2.1 requires a boundary survey by a licensed Professional Land Surveyor on every lot before a site location inspection.
Roughly two in three people here live outside every city: The Census Bureau's Vintage 2024 estimates put Crawford County at 22,808 people. Add up the incorporated places and the total inside city limits is about 8,069: Cuba 3,230, Bourbon 1,533, Steelville 1,445 as the county seat, the Crawford County part of Sullivan 1,502, Leasburg village 318 and St. Cloud village 41. That leaves roughly 14,700 people, close to 65 percent of the county, living in unincorporated territory — Berryman, Cherryville, Cook Station, Davisville, Dillard, Huzzah, Wesco and the miles of wooded acreage between them. It is also worth knowing that the county has been growing again: after falling from 23,054 at the 2020 base to 22,622 in 2022, it added 69 in 2023 and 117 more in 2024.
581 farms, 334 acres apiece, and a third of the farmland in trees: The 2022 Census of Agriculture counts 581 farms in Crawford County holding 194,055 acres, an average of 334 acres each. Land in farms is up 21 percent since 2017 and the average holding up 31 percent, while the number of farms fell 7 percent — bigger blocks in fewer hands, which is the shape of a market where recreational buyers are assembling acreage rather than subdividing it. Of that land, 83,619 acres are pastureland, 62,668 acres are woodland and only 37,793 are cropland. By size, 191 of the farms fall between 50 and 179 acres, 140 between 180 and 499, and 57 run past a thousand.
The electric cooperative is not a backstop for the building: Outside the cities, power here comes from Crawford Electric Cooperative at 10301 N. Service Rd. in Bourbon, which states it serves almost 17,000 members through just over 21,500 meters across Crawford, Franklin, Washington, Gasconade, Jefferson, Dent and Phelps counties and has done since 1940. Its published route to a new connection is a signed membership application, photo identification, the account or meter number and the service address, and either a security deposit or a credit check — with a separate line extension policy and an appointment where a new line has to be built to the property. There is no building permit in that list, no inspection of the house and no requirement to produce anything from the county. Inside Cuba the picture is different, because the city runs its own electric, natural gas, water and sewer systems and its public works office is the place the city directs people for zoning questions and occupancy and safety permits.
Flood mapping is old here, and one town has none: Crawford County's unincorporated area has been in the regular National Flood Insurance Program since 1 May 1987, having been mapped by a flood hazard boundary map on 19 April 1983, and its currently effective flood insurance rate map is dated 20 May 2010. Steelville, Cuba and Leasburg village carry the same 20 May 2010 map date. Bourbon is listed with no special flood hazard area identified at all. None of the five Crawford County communities is recorded as non-participating. A sixteen-year-old effective map on ground drained by three float streams is worth treating as a starting point rather than an answer, particularly on a river tract where the mapped line and the ground you can see may not agree.
The county seat does not publish its ordinances, and neither does Bourbon: Cuba and Sullivan both publish complete codified ordinances online. The other two towns do not. Steelville's city website carries a Planning and Zoning Board with a named chair and five members meeting the second Tuesday of the month, and a separate Appeals and Adjustments board, so the county seat plainly zones — but the ordinances themselves are not posted, and the practical route is City Hall at 895 Frisco Street. Bourbon's official city site is a utility billing portal for water, sewer and trash and carries no ordinances, permits or code pages at all. On any parcel inside either town, the answer to what may be built has to come from the clerk rather than from a screen, and that is worth allowing time for.

Below the slab

The expensive surprises are in the ground, not the building

What moves a Missouri budget is usually below grade, and which problem you have depends on where in the state you are. Across the Ozarks it is karst: the Department of Natural Resources maps more than sixteen thousand sinkhole points, and what matters there is what is under the slab rather than what the slab sits in. Across the north and centre it is claypan — dense, slow-draining subsoil that perches water above it for months of the year. In the Bootheel it is deep alluvium carrying the highest seismic demand in the state, where the same soils modelled for liquefaction attack post embedment and slab bearing rather than the frame above them. The same ground then decides the septic system, and Missouri does not run that on a percolation test alone: the rule allows a perc test or a soil morphology examination in a profile pit, and the authority reviewing your parcel picks which. Where a drainfield sits near a sinkhole's drainage, perc testing on its own is not permitted at all. Whether that authority is the state or your own county is itself a local question, and it changes what you have to file. So the site work, the foundation and the drainfield get resolved together rather than one at a time. We price the dirt before we price the building.

What we build in Crawford County

All nine services are available in Crawford County. What a build costs depends far more on the parcel than on square footage, so we price against your land rather than publishing a rate card.

Custom Plans

Barndominium floor plans drawn to your parcel and your soil, and to whichever Missouri authority — a county, a city, or none at all — will review them.

Barndominium Kits

Barndominium shell packages delivered to your Missouri land, drawn to the criteria your own county or city publishes — because the state publishes none.

Turnkey Builds

Start to finish barndominium construction in Missouri: the permits that genuinely apply, site work, shell and interior finish, under one contract.

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What a build looks like

Three stages every Crawford County project passes through, from a raw parcel to a finished home. Site work first, because that is where the budget is decided.

Stage one

The parcel

Zoning, setbacks, flood zone and utility access get checked before anything is drawn.

Stage two

Pad and permit

Clearing, grading and a compacted pad, while the submittal works through whichever office issues the permit where you are building.

Stage three

Frame to finish

Shell erected and dried in, then systems, insulation and interior finish through to CO.

Those are the rules where you are building in Crawford County. Tell us what you want to build and we will draw it to them.

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Where we build around Crawford County

Crawford County and the rural land around it. The buildable acreage for a project this size usually sits outside the city limits, which is frequently what changes who issues your permit.

The Crawford County service area, including the rural acreage outside the built-up edge, which is where the parcels big enough for a build like this usually sit. The map marks the territory we build in. It is not a branch location, and there is no office at this pin.

Keep reading

The questions that usually come next once you know what Crawford County allows.

Barndominium Cost Guide

Sourced per-square-foot ranges by tier and by size, with a calculator built on the same figures.

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Is It Legal in Missouri?

Classification, zoning, the HOA gate, and why "nonresidential farm building" does not cover a home.

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How Long Does It Take?

Census build-duration data, and what actually sets the permit clock where you are building.

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Nearby areas we build in

Others we cover nearby, and they are not interchangeable. One may be a county with an adopted building code, another a county with no legal authority to have one, another a city that permits inside its own limits whichever county the land sits in. So the office that issues the permit, whether anyone inspects the work at all, the fees, the zoning and the design figures can differ from one card to the next — sometimes across a single property line.

Rolla

Phelps County

Franklin County

Texas County

Building in Crawford County: common questions

8 questions we get asked most often about building in Crawford County. If yours is not on the list, ask it directly.

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Do I need a building permit to build a barndominium in Crawford County?

From the county, no — and it is not a matter of the county choosing not to. RSMo 64.170(1) gives the power to control construction and issue building permits only to county commissions in counties of the first and second classification, and Crawford is third classification on the Missouri Association of Counties list published in May 2025. There is no county building code, no county building permit and no county inspection of a dwelling. But that is not the whole answer, and this county is a good example of why. If your tract sits in the Cuba Community Fire Protection District or the Bourbon Fire Protection District, that district issues construction permits of its own under RSMo 321.220(12) — Cuba's at eight cents a square foot with a $150 minimum, Bourbon's for new commercial construction with plan review and an on-site inspection. And inside the limits of Cuba or Sullivan, the city's own building code applies. The one permit that reaches almost every rural build is the onsite wastewater permit from the Crawford County Health Department in Steelville.

A fire district issuing building permits sounds odd. Is that real?

It is, and it is written down. RSMo 321.220(12) lets a fire protection district board adopt fire protection and fire prevention ordinances and refer violations to the county prosecutor. The Cuba Community Fire Protection District used that power on 14 December 2021 to adopt the 2018 International Fire Code by Ordinance 21-01 and the 2018 International Building Code by Ordinance 21-02, both effective 1 January 2022, and Ordinance 21-02 says on its face that it reaches the portions of Crawford County inside the district as well as the city of Cuba. The Bourbon Fire Protection District adopted the 2018 International Fire Code in 2021 and requires a building permit for new commercial business construction. Two things keep this narrower than it sounds. Neither district adopted a residential code, and the Cuba ordinance actually strikes 'structural strength' and 'energy conservation' out of the code's own statement of intent. And RSMo 321.220(12) says a district's ordinances may not require permits for the erection, alteration or extension of farm buildings or farm structures. Ask the district by name and by address before you assume either way.

My tract is over three acres — does that mean I skip the septic permit?

Do not assume so here. RSMo 701.031 does exclude the owner of a single-family residence lot of three acres or more from the state onsite programme, provided every point of the system is more than ten feet from any adjoining property line and no effluent reaches the neighbour, surface water or groundwater. But RSMo 701.047 lets a county adopt minimum standards more restrictive than the state's, and the Department of Health and Senior Services records Crawford County's authority type as Ordinance, adding that the county 'has their own Onsite Wastewater Ordinance and may have additional requirements beyond the state minimum construction standards.' In counties that have gone that route the acreage threshold is a local decision, not a statewide one, and it is set wherever the county set it. The Crawford County Health Department at 202 W. Main Street in Steelville is the office that answers this, and it is a question to settle before closing rather than after.

Onondaga Cave is here. Should the karst change how I build?

It should change what you look at, and less than you might fear on the foundation. The state's inventory maps 92 sinkhole points inside Crawford County — real karst, but well short of the 492 in Dent County next door. On foundations, the county's own soil survey says bedrock is shallower than about twenty inches on only 2.7 percent of the survey area. What is actually there is chert gravel, slope and a fragipan: the biggest single map unit in the county is Alred-Rueter complex on 15 to 35 percent slopes, very stony, at 46,744 acres, soils whose slope class starts at 15 percent cover more than a third of the county, and a dense fragipan is mapped on 85,221 acres between about sixteen and thirty-eight inches down. So the practical karst questions are two: whether any closed depression, spring or losing reach sits near the proposed drainfield, which changes what the wastewater authority will accept, and whether a depression sits on the building pad itself, which is a soils and foundation question rather than a landscaping one. Both are answered by looking at your specific tract with the state's mapped inventory as the starting point.

What wind speed, snow load and frost depth should the plans be designed to?

That depends entirely on where the tract sits, and outside a city there is no published answer, because there is no adopted code table to publish one in. One jurisdiction with ground inside this county does publish a table. The city of Sullivan, whose limits cross the county line, adopted the 2018 International Residential Code by Ordinance No. 3823 in November 2018 and filled in Table R301.2(1) with 20 psf ground snow, a 115 mph wind design speed, Seismic Design Category C, severe weathering, a 30-inch frost line, termite exposure moderate to heavy and an air freezing index of 767. Those figures govern a permit in Sullivan and they are Sullivan's; they are not the county's and nothing makes them apply a mile outside the city. Cuba, on the 2009 codes, keeps its amendments on file at city hall rather than in the printed code, so it publishes no comparable table. On unincorporated ground the honest position is that the design values are a matter between you and whoever seals your structural drawings, and that a Missouri-licensed professional engineer is the person who should be setting them for the specific site.

Can I put up a metal building, or are there restrictions on the exterior?

There is nothing standing in the way in this county. Cuba, which has the most detailed development code of any jurisdiction here, does not restrict exterior materials at all — the word 'corrugated' does not appear anywhere in its code, 'metal' appears only in the scrap-metal, metal-tired-vehicle and culvert provisions, and there is no minimum roof pitch, no eave projection requirement and no design review of appearance. The same searches of Sullivan's code turn up corrugated pipe in the stormwater and septic specifications and nothing about walls or roofs. And on unincorporated ground the county has no zoning at all, so there is no instrument in which such a rule could sit. The one restriction worth knowing is a size rule rather than a materials rule: in Cuba's R-1 district a detached garage or carport is limited to 250 square feet for each 3,000 square feet of lot area and may never exceed 1,200 square feet in total, however large the lot.

How big a shop can I build next to the house?

Outside a city, as big as you want to pay for — there is no county cap, no county zoning and no county permit. Inside Cuba the limit is specific and it is the tightest thing in the county: section 400.1030 allows one detached garage or covered carport per residential structure in R-1, sized at 250 square feet for each 3,000 square feet of lot area, with an absolute ceiling of 1,200 square feet, and section 400.970 adds that an accessory structure in a rear yard may not occupy more than 30 percent of the required rear yard area. Inside Sullivan there is no square-foot cap of that kind, but the permit line falls at 200 square feet: the city's amended R105.2 exempts a one-storey detached accessory structure of 200 square feet or less from needing a permit, and its amended frost protection rule exempts the same 200-square-foot building with an eave height of ten feet or under. Anything larger is permitted and inspected. If the shop is genuinely a farm building, RSMo 321.220(12) also bars a fire protection district from requiring a permit for it.

If the county does not inspect, does anybody?

The county does not, and that is exactly what its classification establishes — but 'the county does not inspect' is a different sentence from 'nobody does', and in Crawford County the difference is real. Cuba and Sullivan each inspect inside their limits under their own adopted codes; Sullivan's amendments run to a required boundary survey by a licensed Professional Land Surveyor before the site location inspection. The Cuba Community and Bourbon fire protection districts both run inspection programmes under their adopted codes, Cuba's including inspection during construction, fire protection systems testing and a final inspection by the fire marshal. The health department inspects the wastewater system. What is genuinely unsupervised on unincorporated ground with no district permit is the structure and the interior wiring of the house itself, and the electric cooperative does not fill that gap — its published route to a new service is a membership application, identification, an address and a deposit, with no building permit or inspection anywhere in it. That is the practical case for having the structural design sealed by a Missouri-licensed professional engineer whether or not anyone will ask to see it.

Building in Crawford County?

Start with the plan. Tell us what you want to build and we will draw it, then confirm which office issues the permit for your parcel, what it will let you put there, and what wind load it has to meet. That conversation costs nothing.

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