I have previously written about John Pitchlynn and Fort Smith at Plymouth Bluff during the Creek Indian War of 1813-1814, but there is much more history surrounding the bluff than just that. Historic sites associated with the bluff range from a 3,000-year-old Indian camp site in the floodplain below the north end of the bluff to a 1736 French army camp site to the 1830s -1850s Town of Plymouth.
Though lacking real evidence, it has even been proposed in the past as the place where de Soto crossed the Tombigbee River in December of 1540.
The reality is that Plymouth Bluff is a very significant historic site. The chalk bluff is the remains of a 75-million-year-old Cretaceous sea where the fossils of shells, fish and even a hadrosaur (duck-billed dinosaur) have been found. On top of the chalk is a soil bed which dates to the Pleistocene or Ice Age. There have been fossils of mammoths, horses and giant ground sloths found there.
Although Paleo-Indians were in the area by 11,000 years ago, the earliest Native American site at the bluff is a Woodland period camp or small village dating back to about 1,000 B C. There is also a Mississippian Period Indian farmstead that dates between 1200 and 1300 A.D.
The French explorer Henri de Tonti passed a few miles west of the bluff on a trade mission to the Chickasaws in 1702. After the mission. Iberville, the governor, informed the Chickasaws that he would establish a trading post in what would be the vicinity of the Choctaw-Chickasaw line along Tibbee Creek which joins the Tombigbee at the north end of Plymouth Bluff. However, there is no record that the post was ever established.
In the 1730s, conflict arose between the Choctaw-French alliance and the Chickasaw-English alliance. In 1735, French governor Bienville of Louisiana decided to invade and subdue the Chickasaws, whose principal villages were at what is now Tupelo. Bienville led a French army of about 600 soldiers up the Tombigbee from Mobile and French Fort Tombecbe ( at present day Epes, Ala. about 65 miles southeast of Columbus). The French force included a company of 45 black soldiers under the command of Simon, a black officer.
The French plan was to rendezvous with a force of Choctaw warriors at the mouth of the Octibia (the French name of Tibbee Creek). The French camped there for three days waiting on the Choctaws, who had been delayed by rain before Bienville proceeded up river without them. The Choctaw French rendezvous finally took place at the site known as Cotton Gin Port near present day Amory. In the fighting at the Chickasaw village of Ackia the French and Choctaw force was soundly defeated by the Chickasaws.
In 1771, British surveyor Bernard Romans descended the Tombigbee River and passed Plymouth Bluff. He wrote a lengthy description of the bluff which he called “a very remarkable bluff.” He concluded by saying, “it looks as if made by art, and if placed near any town of note, I do not doubt would be much used as a walk… its being in the form of a crescent makes it have a very romantic appearance.”
John Pitchlynn moved to the bluff in 1810 and his residence became a frontier crossroad and important meeting place. During the Creek Indian War in 1813, Pitchlynn build a blockhouse and stockade which was called Fort Smith. In 1819, Pitchlynn’s became a U.S. Post Office. After the establishment of Columbus four miles down river, the post office at Pitchlynn’s closed in 1820 and the Columbus Post Office was opened. In 1827 Pitchlynn moved his residence to the Robinson Road across the river from Columbus.
In 1832 Pitchlynn’s son-in-law, Calvin Howell, had the land at Plymouth surveyed and established the town of Plymouth. Howell described the town in 1833 as having “a considerable number of log and frame buildings…We have one store and one grocery, in town, and a young man by the name of Carver, is teaching school.” According to an 1837 county census, the town had a population of 77 free persons and 122 slaves. But by the early 1840s the town was dying and it had all but ceased to exist by the late 1850s.
Today the Bluff is home to the MUW Plymouth Bluff Center which is both an environmental education center and a conference center located on about 190 wooded acres at the crest of the bluff with 4 1/2 miles of nature trails. The center also has guest cabins totaling 24 rooms which can be rented. The center contains a museum of natural and cultural history and offers for sale an excellent history of Plymouth Bluff that I helped write.
There is a monthly “Sundays at the Bluff” series of programs open to the public. These programs alternate between natural history, regional cultural history and archaeology. Today at 2 p.m. Dr. Jerome Goddard, a medical/veterinary entomologist at Mississippi Stare will present the “Evolution of Parasitism – from Ticks to Bed Bugs.”
Rufus Ward is a Columbus native a local historian. E-mail your questions about local history to Rufus at [email protected].
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