A week ago I had the pleasure of meeting some folks from out of town who were just passing through. They are what are known as Loopers. In other words they are traveling by boat on a year long voyage making a giant loop around the Eastern United States on America’s inland waterways.
Their travels had taken them down the Mississippi River, up the Ohio and up the Tennessee Rivers. They were now headed down the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway to Mobile. From there they would travel on the inter-coastal waterway to Florida and then up the east coast and either up to and down the St. Lawrence River or up the Hudson River and Erie Canal to the Great Lakes and the point from where their trip began.
We don’t often think about it but the “Tenn-Tom” Waterway is actually a part of an international super highway. The waterway is one of the world’s interconnected navigable waters and directly links us to almost every nation on earth.
The folks I met had planned to just overnight at the marina at the Stennis/Columbus Lock and Dam. They knew nothing about Columbus and had not planned on spending any time here. Fortunately, they encountered Joe and Carol Boggess who took them on a tour of South Side. Joe called me to join them for lunch and we all had a enjoyable conversation about history over plates of barbecue.
The folks had no idea of the history that overflows around Columbus and decided to stay over and spend a couple of days exploring the town. In the end they said Columbus was a basically unknown gem and was one of the most interesting of the many towns they had passed through.
So many people, even in Columbus, only associate the history of Columbus with antebellum homes and the Civil War. The “Antebellum” history of Columbus and its role in the beginning of Memorial Day are well known. But our history and that of the entire Golden Triangle is so much richer than that.
On the side of Highway 45A just below West Point, is one of the many Indian mounds in the area. There are almost a thousand Native American village or camp sites scattered across the region. Probably the first European contact with what is now Mississippi occurred when Hernando de Soto passed through this area in 1540. Four hundred and seventy-five years ago this December he probably made his winter camp, within the Columbus, Starkville, West Point area, and had the first pork barbecue in what is now Mississippi. That’s 67 years before the English settlement at Jamestown was founded.
Tibbee Creek was the dividing line between The Choctaw and Chickasaw nations. In 1702, Henri de Tonti, a French explore and former lieutenant of La Salle, crossed the creek south of present day West Point after avoiding British slave raiding parties. At Plymouth Bluff, just below the creeks mouth a French army camped for several days in 1736. In 1771, British explorer Bernard Romans suggested that if a town were ever nearby the bluff would surely be a walk or park.
John Pitchlynn moved to Plymouth Bluff in 1810 and in 1813 built Ft. Smith there during the Creek War/War of 1812. In October of 1814, David Crockett arrived there looking for Gen. Coffee’s division of Tennessee Volunteers. Crockett was supposed to be scouting for them but was traveling a week behind them.
The site of Columbus, four miles south of Pitchlynn’s fort, was first settled in 1817 at the Tombigbee River ferry crossing of Andrew Jackson’s Nashville to New Orleans Military Road. The settlement rapidly expanded during the summer of 1819 and in December 1819, was officially recognized as the Town of Columbus. But it was as Columbus, Alabama Territory. After the state line was surveyed in late 1820, it was discovered that the town was actually in Mississippi. In response to that discovery, the town was then incorporated in Mississippi on Feb. 10, 1821.
Skipping the Civil War period, there are wonderful stories about MUW and its origins as Columbus Female Institute a year before Ole Miss was established, World War I Payne Field near West Point, Columbus Air Force Base and its World War II beginnings, Franklin Academy and even the over flight of the Zeppelin Shenandoah with the resulting Crawford panic of 1924. There are stories of Tombigbee River steamboats such as the horrific burning of the Steamer Eliza Battle in 1858 on a freezing flooded river during an ice storm. And then there are the people.
While Columbus is recognized as the birth place of Tennessee Williams and Red Barber, others not always associated with Columbus make an amazing cross section of history and culture. Gideon Lincecum’s study of ants was published by Charles Darwin in support of his “Origin of the Species” and he is buried on Founder’s Row of the Texas State Cemetery in Austin. Lincecum had built the first frame house in Columbus in 1819. William Cocke moved to the site of Columbus probably in June of 1818. He was president of the Board of Trustees of Franklin Academy when it was established in 1821. He was also a friend of Thomas Jefferson and corresponded with Jefferson about the school. You could say that Jefferson may have been Columbus’ first school consultant.
Dr. William Spillman collected fossils in the mid 1800s for the founding fathers of American paleontology. Many of those fossils wound up in the Smithsonian. Reverend Joseph Holt Ingraham was an Episcopal priest at Aberdeen and briefly in Columbus in the 1850s. He wrote a novel, The Pillar of Fire, which Cecil B DeMille used for the screen play of his movie, The Ten Commandments.
Henry Armstrong, who has been called one of the 5 greatest Boxers was born in Columbus. Oscar winning long time head of Disney Studio’s Animation Effects Department, Josh Meador, called Columbus home. Clyde Kilby, biographer of C S Lewis and an editor for J.R.R. Tolkien, retired to Columbus. The list could go on.
From prehistoric Native Americans, to early European exploration, to the War of 1812 and with a host of fascinating people, the story of the Columbus area traces American history and culture. To that add over 600 buildings on the National Registered of Historic Places and that in 2008 the National Trust for Historic Preservation selected Columbus as one of America’s “Dozen Distinctive Destinations.” Columbus truly is a place to discover, even for people who live here.
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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