There are not many places in Mississippi where you can go and have a firsthand account of what happened in that place more than 200 years ago and experience a still almost primeval landscape. One of those places is only five miles from downtown Columbus.

MUW’s Plymouth Bluff Environmental Center is such a place, and this coming Thursday it will host an open house. It has a conference center housing a cultural and natural history museum and 23 cabins that can be rented. There are also almost five miles of nature trails that wind through forest and along the banks and sloughs of the Tombigbee. It is a natural history gem and its cultural history ranges from Native American to French colonial to early American.

The bluff area is also the only Mississippi site listed in a National Park Service report on the preservation of Revolutionary War and War of 1812 sites as a priority site needing further study.

A firsthand description of the events around the bluff in 1813 provide a fascinating account of Choctaw and Chickasaw Indians allied with and fighting alongside Andrew Jackson’s soldiers during the Creek Indian War of 1813-14.

John Pitchlynn was appointed U.S. interpreter for the Choctaw Nation by President George Washington. He also served as Choctaw subagent and often as acting Choctaw agent. He moved his residence from the Noxubee River, near present day Macon, to Plymouth Bluff at the mouth of Tibbee Creek in 1810. Mobile was still under Spanish control and the Spanish there were restricting the movement of U.S. military supplies up the Tombigbee River past Mobile. Between 1810 and 1814 four major shipments of U.S. goods that originated in Pittsburgh passed down the Ohio and Tennessee rivers, overland to Pitchlynn’s, and then by river to the U.S. Choctaw Factor at St. Stephens on the lower Tombigbee.

In early August 1813, hostilities with the Creek Indian Nation were rapidly escalating. Pitchlynn’s residence at Plymouth Bluff was fortified and became known as Fort Smith. The fort was probably named after Capt. George Smith of the Tennessee Militia (he was married to a niece of Andrew Jackson), who in the fall of 1813 had accompanied Col. McKee to Pitchlynn’s. Col. McKee credited Pitchlynn with securing a U.S.-Choctaw alliance against the Creeks in the fall of 1813.

Pitchlynn’s was referred to in the Creek Indian War correspondence of Andrew Jackson, Gen. John Coffee, and Col. John McKee as a U.S. supply depot, meeting place for U.S. officers and Choctaw leaders, and one of the assembly points for the marshaling of Choctaws and Chickasaws prior to their January 1813 invasion of the Creek Nation in support of Jackson’s U.S. military operations.

Peter Pitchlynn, later a governor for the Choctaw Nation, recalled two occasions when the fort was approached by Creek war parties who withdrew upon finding it well defended. The fort consisted of a two-story log blockhouse surrounded by a wooden palisade and containing at least one cannon. At the request of Jackson, there was a guard composed of U.S. troops stationed there. Those troops were in addition to 20 Choctaw warriors already sent there for the fort’s protection by Mushulatubbee, the principal Choctaw chief of the Northeast District of the Choctaw Nation.

Among the notables to stop at Pitchlynn’s for supplies was David Crockett in October 1814. In one of those little told incidents of history, Crockett, as a member of Major Russell’s “company of spies,” arrived at Pitchlynn’s looking for Gen. Coffee’s Second Division of Tennessee Volunteers for whom they were to have been serving as scouts. Coffee had passed through a week earlier.

What was it like at Plymouth Bluff during that time of war? In a Sept. 23, 1846, letter, Peter Pitchlynn recalled his childhood at his father’s fort during the Creek War:

“… none were more exposed than we were to the tommahawk & scalping knife of the Creek Indians [being] then the farthest settlement towards the Creek nation who you know had espoused the cause of England– which brought them in conflict with the Choctaws as well as the people of the United States. Twice had they come to attact us, but finding we were Forted and probably from a belief we were very strong in numbers they retired without making an attact upon us.– I recollect how often we were alarmed by news reaching us that signs of the enemy were about us- One time Mother fled with us the children to Yakmittubbe’s about ten miles off.– the alarm was great, brother James came up in full speed (father was not at home) with news that he had heard the war hoop of the Creek Indians – brother Joseph remained in the fort, being some four years older than myself– he said that if he was not able to fight he could run bullits for those that could fight– Mother cryed when she left him, but not without incouraging him to be brave– upon which Joseph painted his face and said he would die defending the Fort …The past how they crowd upon my mind, and how vivid are the recollections of my youth. I can without the least mental effort see the old homestead as she appeared during the war,– and the war fires blazing on her hills. the war dance, the war talks and many a brave and na humma, long dead now rise up in my mind– What brave noble fellows they were. They had come to the protection of my father, and family, and they would have fallen & died around our little fort ere they would have allowed a Muskoke reaching us with their Tomma hawks. Among those who figured in those scenes how few are living.”

The exact location of Pitchlynn’s fort on the bluff is now lost to time. Research by the late Sam Kaye, Carolyn Kaye, Gary Lancaster, Jack Elliott and myself to locate the fort site has been ongoing. A detailed account of the fort was published by Jack Elliott in the winter 2000 “Journal of Mississippi History.”

Walking along the Plymouth Bluff Center’s almost five miles of forest and riverbank nature trails is almost like being transported back in time to the landscape of 200 years ago that surrounded Pitchlynn’s fort.

From 4:30-6:30 p.m. Thursday, the MUW Plymouth Bluff Environmental Center with the Columbus-Lowndes Chamber of Commerce will have an open house and reopening celebration for the public to come to the Bluff and enjoy programs and events for young and old, while experiencing the natural beauty of the special place that is Plymouth Bluff. The Plymouth Bluff Center is located at 2200 Old West Point Road and it can be reached at (662) 370-1511.

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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