The founding of Columbus involved a series of events stretching from 1810 to 1819. The origins of the town are also tied to John Pitchlynn’s 1810 residence at Plymouth Bluff across the Tombigbee from present-day Columbus.

It was at Pitchlynn’s that in 1813, Fort Smith, a fortified log blockhouse, was constructed. The fort became an important U.S. military meeting, supply and assembly point during the Creek Indian War phase of the War of 1812. It is also the only site in Mississippi that the National Park Service has said may be eligible to become a War of 1812 National Military Park.

In October 1814, David Crockett arrived at Pitchlynn’s to be resupplied on his way to join Gen. Coffee’s Tennessee troops, who were headed to reinforce Andrew Jackson. Crockett and Coffee’s other scouts had missed their rendezvous with the Army in Tennessee and were trailing about a week behind. They did not catch up with them until they were near Mobile.

The two events that set the site that would become Columbus occurred in 1816. The land on which Columbus now sits was ceded to the U.S. by the Choctaw Treaty of 1816, and Andrew Jackson received approval from Congress to build a Military Road from Nashville to New Orleans. The road’s survey was completed by September 1817, and at Pitchlynn’s suggestion, its Tombigbee ferry crossing was placed four miles down river from Pitchlynn’s residence. That crossing is now the location of the bridge to the Island.
The original route of the Military Road runs as it presently does to Third Avenue. There it cut through the middle of the block to the intersection of Second Avenue and Seventh Street North. From Seventh Street, it follows Second Avenue North to the river.

In 1817, settlers began moving into the newly ceded Choctaw lands east of the Tombigbee, and having been no survey of the state line, the land upon which Columbus sits became part of Tuscaloosa County, Alabama. In February 1818, Marion County, Alabama, was formed from the northwestern part of Tuscaloosa County, and Cotton Gin Port (near present-day Amory) was chosen as the Marion County seat.

The first house at what became Columbus was built in the fall of 1817, near where the Tennessee Williams House Museum is now located. Silas McBee and his family also arrived in 1817 and built a house near the mouth of McBee (now Magby) Creek. By mid-June of 1818, William Cocke, a former Tennessee senator, Chickasaw Indian agent and associate of Thomas Jefferson, was living with his family on the Tombigbee River, which may have been in Columbus where he was residing by 1819 in a two-story log house next to the Thomas house. It was around 1818 that the Cedars was constructed as a farmhouse near a spring on the Military Road two miles north of the original town limits. The new settlement was growing, and June 1819 saw the arrival of several families who built houses at what is now downtown Columbus. The settlement began to organize as a town and Silas McBee suggested that the new town be called Columbus.

In 1819, the county seat of Marion County, Alabama, was moved to the house of Henry Greer to place it closer to the rapidly growing Columbus settlement, which was still believed to be in Alabama. Greer’s house was located at the present site of Columbus Air Force Base. A settlement known as Hamilton would arise just across the Buttahatchie River from Greer’s house. Also in 1819, Silas McBee of Columbus represented Marion County in the Alabama Legislature. William Cocke’s stepson, Bartlett Sims, was elected sheriff of Marion County, and Richard Barry of Columbus was the county’s notary public.

The earliest surviving narrative of the history of Columbus was written by Oscar Keeler in 1848. It states that in the latter part of the year 1817, a man named Thomas Thomas built a small split log hut in Columbus after the Indian agent (William Cocke) ran him out of the Chickasaw Nation for being an intruder. However, Keeler said there was no sign of the cabin having been occupied until around 1819. Keeler also told how Spirus Roach “occupied and kept entertainment in the house built by Thomas Thomas and from the peculiarities of himself and family, the Indians named the place Shook-huttah-Tom-a-hah, or Opossum Town.” According to Keeler’s 1851 account, the site of that first cabin was at the corner of present-day Main Street and Third Street South, about where the Tennessee Williams House Museum is now located.

Keeler listed the following as coming to the new settlement “about the middle of June 1819: Thomas Sampson, William Viser, William Poor and Spirus Roach.” Keeler then stated that shortly after the first group arrived, “Thomas Townsend, Green Bailey, Dr. B.C. Barry, Silas Brown, Hancock Chisolm, William Connover, William Fernandes, John H. Leech and several other young men came to the place.” Other records reflect Gideon Lincecum, Thomas Moore, Ovid Brown, Richard Barry and several others settled within what are the present-day Columbus city limits in 1819.

Although Keeler said the first house in 1817 was built by Thomas Thomas, another possibility is that Thomas Cheadle built the house. He was employed by Chickasaw Agent William Cocke as a carpenter at the agency until Sept. 2, 1817. His leaving the agency just happens to coincide with the time that the future site of Columbus was selected as the Military Road Tombigbee crossing, and Cocke was learning he would be replaced as Chickasaw Agent. By the following June, Cocke had moved to a house on the Tombigbee River. To add to the confusion, some sources say it was Thomas Moore who built that first house on the Tombigbee bluff in 1817.

By mid-summer of 1819, a small collection of log cabins overlooking the Military Road’s Tombigbee River ferry crossing was rapidly growing, and by fall, at least 16 families were living there. Though not yet officially recognized as a town, it had taken the name of Columbus. On Dec. 6, 1819, the Alabama Legislature officially referred to the Town of Columbus in Marion County in a legislative act. That was followed by the establishment of the Columbus Post Office on March 6, 1820. The state line survey was completed in late 1820, and on Jan. 3, 1821, Gov. Poindexter of Mississippi announced that a tract of land on the east side of the Tombigbee that had been attached to Alabama was actually in Mississippi. Then on Feb. 10, 1821, the Mississippi Legislature chartered the Town of Columbus.

There are a few early accounts of Columbus that were written within 60 years of its founding when several early settlers were still living. The best are by W.E. Gibbs in the 1872 Columbus Index, Rev. George Shaeffer’s account of Columbus in 1822 was reprinted in W.L. Lipscomb’s 1909 History of Columbus and in Oscar Keeler’s Almanacs of 1848 and 1851. Additional information is provided by brief historical accounts published in 1861 and 1891.

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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