The Columbus Riverwalk is not only a touch of natural beauty at the edge of downtown Columbus but also a place steeped in history. It provides a walk through 483 years of the African American history of Columbus.

There are at least 12 sites along the Tombigbee riverfront in Columbus related to Black history. The sites are along or close to the Riverwalk. There is a rich Black history to be found in Columbus’ earliest days, and it is a story that needs to be told.

The Riverwalk itself follows a real pathway to freedom. A branch of the Underground Railroad, a route for enslaved persons to escape to freedom before the Civil War, was said to have run up the Tombigbee to the Tennessee River and then to the Ohio River and freedom. The spiritual, “Follow the Drinking Gourd,” is said to have been a verbal road map of that route with the drinking gourd being the big dipper/North Star. It is a story that has received national attention including being the basis of a bicycle trail from Canada to Mobile. The route was said to have been made by a man called “Peg-Leg Joe” and was marked with the image in charcoal or mud of a footprint and a circle on tree trunks.

Some credence to the story is found in the writings of Alexander Ross, an abolitionist secretly working in the South in the 1850s helping enslaved people escape. Ross wrote of helping two enslaved persons escape from Columbus in 1858 using the North Star as their guide.

They traveled north across creeks and marshes and through woods to freedom across the Ohio River. It was a route that would have taken them up the Tombigbee using the riverbank and the North star as their guide just as in the song.

The earliest exploration of the Upper Tombigbee by Europeans was the 1540 Spanish expedition of Hernando de Soto. The expedition, which crossed the Tombigbee in the Columbus area in mid-December of 1540, included seven or eight Black soldiers. Somewhere in the Columbus-Starkville area, de Soto had the first pork barbecue.

At the south end of First Street South was Turner’s Cut, which was a mid-1800s river landing with a cotton slide cut through the bluff for loading cotton bales onto steamboats. The Blacks, at first enslaved persons and later freemen, rolled 500-pound cotton bales from warehouses at the top of the river bluff and pushed them down a wooden plank-floored slide to the boats below. These workers were called rollodores. Just downriver from Turner’s cut and south of the railroad trestle was a late 1800s to early 1900s steamboat landing in use until about 1920.

In 1842, engineer/architect Horace King, an enslaved Black person, constructed at Columbus the first bridge across the upper Tombigbee River and built several other bridges in Lowndes County. The Tombigbee bridge came off the top of the bluff at Fourth Avenue South and was a wooden covered bridge, 420-feet long. He later secured his freedom and became one of the most prominent bridge builders in the South.

By the mid-1830s, warehouses were constructed along the river running south from the present-day Riverwalk College Street parking lot. Even today, in the thicket along the river just south of the parking lot, bricks can be found that mark the remains of the Union Warehouse that was constructed in the mid-1830s. It was at those warehouses that Black workers loaded, unloaded and stored cargo from steamboats.

From the site of those warehouses to the foot of Main Street was the original Columbus river landing. The first keelboat for Tombigbee River trade built at the site of Columbus was said to have been built by two Black men in 1817 or 1818. The first steamboat, the Cotton Plant, arrived here in March 1823. Here many Black workers, enslaved and later free, worked handling cargo and tending to boats for almost 100 years.

A few of their work chants heard at this site have survived. This chant mentions steamboats in the Columbus-Mobile trade during the 1870s.

“The William S. Holt and John T. Moore.
All them boats are mine.
Oh see the boat go round the bend,
Goodbye, my lover, goodbye.
Loaded with Columbus men,
Goodbye, my lover, goodbye.”

From the river landing at the foot of Main Street, hundreds of steamboats departed for Mobile during the 1800s. The crews were made up of mostly Black men. Though often not named, Black crewmen saved many lives, sometimes at the cost of their own, during disasters such as the burning of the Eliza Battle in 1858 and the W.H. Gardner in 1887.

The Gardner left Columbus for Mobile in late February 1887. On March 1, she caught fire and burned near Gainesville, Alabama. Though 22 people died, the death toll would have been much higher but for the heroic actions of several Black crew members.

The heroic acts of BeeBee Macaw the boat’s Black “cabin boy” in saving the lives of five people received national recognition. His actions were even celebrated in the famous Old West newspaper, The Tombstone Epitaph.

Buried under the river bank across from the pavilion between Moore’s Creek and the Island bridge rest the remains of the Alice M, a small steam boat 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. The boat drifted down river and lodged against the west bank just north of the 1877 bridge.

Rienhart was buried on the riverbank near Symons Mill. The mill was located on the east bank of the river between what is now the mouth of Moore’s Creek and Rubin’s Catfish Restaurant.

An 1863 Confederate map shows entrenchments and fortifications extending across what is now Highway 82 to the riverbank. Those fortifications were constructed in 1862 and 1863 by more than 900 enslaved workers obtained by the Confederate army. There is an odd ditch and embankment which crosses the Riverwalk and may be the remains of those fortifications.

At the riverbend, the Tenn-Tom Waterway cuts through the middle of the old Cotton shipping river town of West Port. The town was a major cotton shipping center until destroyed by the flood of 1847 and another flood and fire in the early 1850s. There was also a ferry located here.

The Riverwalk ends just upstream from West Port and about a mile south of Plymouth Bluff and the Stennis Lock and Dam. At the bluff we find a wealth of early history. From 1736, we have the story of Simon, who was known as “the Brave Free Black.” Simon was a free Black French officer who commanded a company of 45 Black French soldiers during the French – Chickasaw campaign of May 1736. The French force of about 600 came up the Tombigbee and camped for three days at Plymouth Bluff.

George Gaines (U.S. Choctaw Factory) in March 1814 transported supplies by flatboat from John Pitchlynn’s residence (U.S. Choctaw Interpreter and acting agent) at Plymouth Bluff to St. Stephens. He had a crew of five, including Dick, a Black man. Earlier in Jan. 1814, Gaines had sent a Choctaw Factory (trading post) boat upriver from St. Stephens to Pitchlynn’s. Two unnamed Black men were hired to row the boat. Between 1806 and 1816, 22 different Black men were employed by the U.S. Choctaw Factory (trading post) on the lower Tombigbee River. While the names of most of these explorers, workmen, soldiers, boatmen and builders have been forgotten, their legacy lives on and their footsteps can be found along the Columbus riverfront and Riverwalk.

Rufus Ward is a Columbus native a local historian. E-mail your questions about local history to Rufus at [email protected].

READER FAVORITES

• 

  Our View: Selfish people don’t plant flowers

  By Dispatch Editorial Board • 2 days ago

• 

  Slimantics: Redistricting by another name is no less offensive

  By Slim Smith • 24 hours ago

• 

  Our View: We don’t want to hear, ‘there’s nothing to do’

  By Dispatch Editorial Board • 24 hours ago