As planning has progressed for a fossil park, an interesting suggestion has been made. Why not include a paleo garden, which is a garden of surviving plants from 80 million years ago? People would be surprised by how many ancestors of today’s common plants covered the landscape when dinosaurs roamed the earth.
Eighty million years ago ancestors of many of today’s common trees were found, including magnolia, cypress, maple, ginkgo, sycamore, fir, long leaf pine, cedar, oak, laurel, walnut, beech, willow, palm, poplar, redwood and sequoias. There were also yew and sassafras. It was the time when many of today’s plants developed. Grasses, figs, plums and grapes appeared, while ferns, cycads and horsetails thrived.
Flowering plants, including passion flowers, daisies and mint, began to spread across the landscape. By 80 million years ago, it was a landscape covered by plants and trees very familiar to us today.
The site of Propst Park on the Luxapalila was an estuary on the edge of a huge Cretaceous Sea that stretched to Texas. Southwest of Columbus at Jackson and Midnight in the Delta were volcanoes, the ash from which created the bentonite deposits near Aberdeen. Throw in the dinosaurs, and it was a wild landscape.
The Luxapalila was still a wild landscape when Gideon Lincecum, one the first Anglo-American settlers, moved here in 1818. His descriptions of the Luxapalila and Columbus landscape from over 200 years ago have survived. They show it also was a different world than today.
In 1818, Gideon Lincecum moved his family from Tuscaloosa and built a house on the banks of the Tombigbee River in the area of the present day John C. Stennis Lock and Dam public boat ramp. In 1819, he moved three miles downriver and built a house and store on what is now the Elks Club/Gilmer block downtown.
Lincecum’s account of that move, which is found in the fascinating book, “Adventures of a Frontier Naturalist,” is the earliest description of Columbus at its founding. He paints a vivid image of a wild and beautiful forest teeming with wild life before it was cleared. His last two campsites before arriving at the Tombigbee were at two creeks the Choctaws called “Lua Copesa” (which means Cold Fire) and “Lookse-ok-pullia” (which means “a terrapin floating on the water”). His next camp was on the banks of the Tombigbee three miles north of present day downtown.
Lincecum’s descriptions present the Luxapalila and Columbus in their primeval setting. “At our camp near Cold Fire Creek. (Just south of Columbus on Highway 69. It is now incorrectly called Coal Fire). There certainly must have been half a dozen packs of them (wolves) around the camp and they came so near we could hear them snapping their teeth.” At the Luxapalila camp: “It was full of blue-winged teal, swarming like wild pigeons. … We heard the panthers scream; the raccoons complained; the owls came near and hooted awfully; and the wolves howled all night.” On the journey which had taken 12 days, hundreds of “fat turkeys” had been seen.
At what is now where Catfish Alley intersects with Main Street in downtown Columbus, Lincecum killed a “big buck with a chair frame (antlers) on his head.” The deer fell at the base of a large pine tree, and after cutting the deer’s throat, Lincecum cleaned his knife by cutting into the tree with it. The Eagle Hotel was built in that location and its signpost stood where the large pine had been. That later became the site of the Gilmer Hotel.
Lincecum expressed delight at the beauty of his campsite three miles from present day downtown. It was situated in a bend of the river near a canebrake that came almost to the water’s edge. It was on a low bluff where a spring flowed from the roots of a large sycamore tree splashing onto a rock extending out from the base of the bluff. On the first night he camped there, at least 40 turkeys lit in nearby trees. The next morning, he shot one that dressed out at 29 1/2 pounds. He explored the river around his camp and found “plenty of bear and deer signs.” Fishing in the river was excellent and several catfish, more than 80 pounds, were caught. Lincecum said that Choctaws were living only two miles across the river as was John Pitchlynn, who turned out to be a cousin.
According to Lincecum, what is now the Island across from Columbus was a favorite hunting ground of Choctaw Indians who called it “Shonk Colohenocoby” or “Crooked Cypress.” Lincecum called the area “White Slue.” He described it as a “string of ponds and lakes” and wrote that in “the canebrakes and all around the cypress swamp could be found “more turkeys and deer, some bear, coons, foxes, panthers and catamounts than at any place I ever lived.” Though lacking dinosaurs, when Columbus was settled the area around Columbus and along the Luxapalila was still a wild place with panthers, bear and wolves.
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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