This week, I spoke to two groups of community college students from Mississippi and Louisiana who were at Mississippi University for Women for a regional honors institute. We were at MUW’s Plymouth Bluff Center, and I talked to the students about the fascinating history of the bluff.

My stories ranged from the bluff being the remains of a 77-million-year-old Cretaceous sea where the fossils of shells, fish, marine reptiles and even a hadrosaur (duck-billed dinosaur) have been found, to John Pitchlynn’s Fort Smith, which was built during the Creek Indian War of 1813-1814.

During the Cretaceous period, the age of dinosaurs, a great inland sea began stretching about 100 million years ago from the Gulf of Mexico into Canada. Its eastern shore was located in present day western Alabama between Columbus and Tuscaloosa. There were volcanic islands where Jackson and Midnight, Mississippi (in the Delta) are located. The ocean deposits at Plymouth Bluff are from that period and date from 82 to 77 million years ago.

Plymouth Bluff has been nationally known as an important site for fossils since the 1850s when Dr. William Spillman of Columbus collected fossils there that became important type specimens at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. The 1858 Geological Survey of Mississippi even included the drawing of a cross section of the bluff.

Unfortunately, the 80-foot tall bluff no longer appears as it once did. A new river channel for the Stennis Lock and Dam at Columbus bypassed the bluff to preserve it. However, there was an unintended consequence. Yearly high waters no longer scour the face of the bluff keeping it clean, and much of the bluff’s face is now covered by vegetation. The face of the bluff is not as spectacular a sight as it once was but is still beautiful and fossils can still be found.

Shark teeth are common in some of the strata as are large, ribbed oyster related shells called Exogyra. On the sandstone shelf at the base of the bluff are often found the impressions of a large mussel-type shell named Inoceramus and sometimes Ammonites, a coiled shell of a mollusk related to the chambered Nautilus. In the 1850s part of a fossil Ammonite was found there which if whole would have been about 12 feet in diameter.

The bluff is one of the few places in Mississippi where dinosaur fossils have been found. A few fossil bones of hadrosaurs (duck-billed dinosaurs) have been found there and a good many fragments of fossil turtle bones and shells have also been found as have mosasaur bones and teeth. Shark teeth are common and fish vertebrae, and the teeth of a saber tooth fish can also be found. These fossils are most common below the sandstone shelf.

The soil at the top of the bluff dates to the Late Pleistocene, which is often referred to as the Ice Age. Common fossils found in the area include the teeth of extinct horses and fragments of mastodon and mammoth teeth. Fossil bones of llamas, long horned bison, wolves, and bears have also been found. The saber-toothed cat was here but its fossils are rare. One of the largest animals and most unusual, whose fossils may be found, is the giant ground sloth.

The bluff’s cultural history is as fascinating as its geologic history. Indian artifacts found in the bluff area show the area has been inhibited for thousands of years. The first historic record of the bluff was of a French army camping there for three days in May 1736. In 1737, the Chickasaw Nation was reported to have had a small fort there.

In 1771, British surveyor Bernard Romans descended the Tombigbee River and passed Plymouth Bluff. He wrote a lengthy description of the bluff which he called “a very remarkable bluff.” He concluded by saying, “it looks as if made by art, and if placed near any town of note, I do not doubt would be much used as a walk.”

John Pitchlynn, the bluff’s most famous resident, 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 had moved his residence from the Noxubee River, near present-day Macon, to Plymouth Bluff at the mouth of Tibbee Creek in 1810 to help facilitate the movement of U.S. goods down the Tombigbee River.

Between 1810 and 1814 four major shipments of U.S. goods that had originated in Pittsburgh, passed down the Ohio and Tennessee rivers, then overland to Pitchlynn’s, and then by river to the U.S. Choctaw Factor at St. Stephens on the lower Tombigbee.

Pitchlynn’s residence was referred to in the Creek Indian War correspondence of Andrew Jackson, Gen. John Coffee, Col. John McKee and Choctaw Factor George Gaines as a U.S. supply depot and a meeting place for U.S. officers and Choctaw leaders.

A small fort named Fort Smith was constructed there in the summer of 1813. The fort consisted of a two story log blockhouse surrounded by a wooden palisade and containing at least one cannon. At the request of Andrew Jackson, there was a guard composed of U.S. troops stationed there. Those troops were in addition to 20 Choctaw warriors already sent there by Mushulatubbee, the principal Choctaw chief of the Northeast District of the Choctaw Nation.

Col. McKee credited Pitchlynn with securing a U.S.-Choctaw alliance against the Creeks in the fall of 1813.The fort became one of the assembly points for the marshaling of Choctaws and Chickasaws prior to their January 1814 invasion of the Creek Nation in support of U.S. military operations. Peter Pitchlynn, later a governor of the Choctaw Nation, recalled two occasions when the fort was approached by Creek war parties who withdrew upon finding it well defended.

The last military activity at the fort occurred in early 1815 when Pitchlynn fired the fort’s cannon to celebrate the end of the War of 1812. The cannon exploded and Pitchlynn then commented, “Well we have no further use for her – she has served us through the war and busted in telling us the news of peace.

Plymouth Bluff is an incredibly beautiful and remarkable place that has an almost primeval feel. It is home to the MUW Plymouth Bluff Center which is both an environmental education center and a conference center with 4 1/2 miles of public nature trails. The center contains a small but excellent museum of natural and cultural history which includes a significant display of area fossils. Although the walking trails are open to the public the center itself is open by appointment and may be contacted 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].

READER FAVORITES

• 

  Roses and Thorns: 6-13-26

  By Dispatch Editorial Board • 1 day ago