This weekend the Lee High Class of 1968 is having its 55th reunion. It is taking place at Nathan’s Landing, an event center that once was the old Snow White Club.
That was one of a long line of establishments that sold libations across the river from Columbus beginning around 1819. The history of what is now known as the Island goes much further back and deeper in time. The Island was formed in 1984 when the Tombigbee River’s horseshoe bend at Columbus was cut through to form the channel of the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway.
The area was once a mixture of mostly canebrakes and cypress swamps, but in the 1830s it became the now-extinct town of West Port.
After a devastating flood in 1847 followed by a fire and another flood in 1851, the town rapidly declined until it disappeared and was replaced by a few residences, light industry and beer joints.
Along the northwest side of the Island, parts of what was called “Shonk Colocherocoby” or “Crooked Cypress” by the Choctaw and “White Slough” by early Anglo settlers, still survive. Gideon Lincecum, who moved to what is now the Stennis (Columbus) Lock and Dam East Bank area in 1818, said it was a favorite hunting ground of the Choctaw.
Its long association with Native American hunting was shown by the finding of a 2,000-year-old small spear point embedded in a buried cypress knee during the construction of the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway cut-off. Archaeological excavations also turned up 1,500-year-old pottery fragments from Indians who predated the Choctaw.
Lincecum recalled of White Slough, “In the canebrake and all around the cypress swamp could be found more turkeys and deer, and some bear, coons, foxes, panthers and catamounts than at any place I ever lived.” He also found that during the winter the slough filled up with ducks and geese. He hunted both to provide food for his family and to obtain venison to smoke for shipment to sell at markets in Mobile, Alabama.
Lincecum related how many people would hunt bears armed only with a knife. In the early 1800s the forest around Columbus were home to packs of wolves, a natural enemy of the bear. Hunters led by a pack of dogs would pursue bears. The bear would ignore the human hunters to attack the dogs, associating them with wolves. That enabled the hunters to jump on the bear and kill it with a knife while it was preoccupied with the dogs. Lincecum told how the most dangerous aspect of the hunt was not the bear. It was a hunter armed with a gun who might accidentally shoot another hunter who was on a bear with a knife.
Around 1819, John Pitchlynn Jr. and Gideon Lincecum opened a store on what is now the Island for the Choctaw Indian trade. That followed the opening of Andrew Jackson’s Military Road from Nashville to New Orleans. The Old Macon Road remnant on the Island constitutes the remains of the Military Road. At their storehouse they sold not only merchandise but also libations. For the next 172 years until the closing of Bob’s Place, when the new bridge was constructed the area, was a popular watering hole with numerous establishments serving food and drink.
The prairie west of the Tombigbee was opened for Euro-American settlement after the Choctaw Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek in 1830 and its subsequent survey in 1832. To avoid paying a toll to cross the Columbus ferry and the 1842 Tombigbee bridge built by Black architect/engineer Horace King, businesses and warehouses were constructed on the west side of the river. These businesses were centered two miles from Columbus along the Robinson Road, which had been constructed from Columbus to Jackson in the early 1820s.
A town named West Port grew up where the businesses were located. It was surveyed and a plat drawn in 1834 showing the plans for a town encompassing a square mile running south from a bend in the Tombigbee. In 1836, M.M. Carrington built the first tavern and warehouse there. West Port became a major cotton shipping point on the Tombigbee. Then, in 1847, much of the town was destroyed by a flood, and a couple of years later it was devastated by a fire followed by another flood in 1851. West Port never recovered, and in 1901 W. L. Lipscomb described it as a “desert of white sand.”
During the 1847 flood The steamboat Putnam was headed to West Port but found the river so high it could not pass under the bridge that crossed the river at Bridge Street (now Fourth Avenue South). According to the Columbus Democrat of December 18, 1847, “The steamer Putman was able Wednesday morning to take a new route. The engineer turned the bridge on the west side and steering over the old field made a shortcut across the bend, into the main stream some distance above the bridge. Where the Putman ploughed its way through water ten feet was dry land the week before.”
Buried under the Island river bank north of the 1991 bridge rest the remains of the Fanny W, a small steamboat owned by two Black Columbus businessmen, Wesley and Eli Hodges, who operated a blacksmith and wagon repair shop. The boat was headed upriver when its boiler exploded, killing the boat’s fireman Wesley Rienhart and injuring eight others. The burning boat drifted down river and lodged against the west bank upstream from the 1877 bridge.
During Prohibition what is the Island again came alive. By the 1940 establishments there ranged from good food and beer at Bob’s to beer and dancing at the 20th Century Club (Southernaire) to the Round House with its sawdust floor.
Of some of the rougher places it was said you would be searched before you entered and if you did not have a knife or gun, you would be issued one. Others such as Bob’s were multi-generational. My parents hung out at Bob’s when they were in high school, and I also spent many an evening there. The tearing down of Bob’s in 1991 for the new bridge brought an end to an almost 175-year tradition of good food and plenty of libations being served just across the river from downtown Columbus.
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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