As the weather warms and spring approaches, traffic on the Riverwalk picks up. Recently I have been walking there, not only enjoying the touch of natural beauty at the edge of downtown, but seeing old friends and making new ones. It is a place where almost everyone speaks as they pass, and, too, it is a place steeped in history.
It is amazing such a beautiful and accessible walking trail passes through 500 years of local history.
Some of what looks like ditches may be the remains of Civil War fortifications or even older roads. Flowers in the woods mark old house sites.
On the river bank at the end of College Street is a parking lot for the Riverwalk. This was the early Tombigbee boat landing.
The first keelboats landed near here about 1818.
In 1822 the first steamboat, the Cotton Plant, landed at the foot of Main Street. This landing witnessed events ranging from the departure of the ill-fated Eliza Battle into ghostly legend to the movement of Confederate troops and supplies by steamboat.
Just downstream from the Riverwalk parking lot was the 1840s Union warehouse which marked the lower end of the boat landing. Off of the top of the high bluff of the downstream river bend, African-American engineer Horace King constructed a wooden covered bridge across the river in 1842.
The recently restored old 1928 drawbridge crosses about where the upper limit of the boat landing would have been. It was about there that one of the last Upper Tombigbee steamboats, the City of Columbus, burned in 1911.
The newest Tombigbee bridge was built on the site of the 1877 iron bridge, which is also the old Military Road ferry crossing from 1817.
John Pitchlynn, the U.S. interpreter for the Choctaw Nation, described how Indians would raft across the river at high water there. It also may be the crossing point to which Hernando de Soto was led by Indian guides in December 1540 as he found the river flooded and built rafts to cross it.
About 1848 two French cannon were found in the river near here; their origin never determined. During the Civil War the Confederate army constructed a pontoon bridge at the foot of Main Street and a small fort to protect it. Here on the west bank of the river, the wrecked hull of the Fanny W. was said to rest. She was a steamboat owned by African-American businessmen in Columbus. Her boilers exploded in 1878. Though almost to Waverley, the remains of her hull floated downstream and lodged against the riverbank across from Columbus.
There is a bridge on the Riverwalk crossing Moore’s Creek. This creek was first known as Tan Yard Creek. By the early 1820s there was a tan yard about where the soccer complex is now. Not far down the walkway is the Butterfly Garden. It is maintained by Lowndes County Master Gardeners. In spring, summer and fall, it is an oasis of beauty.
Walking through woods and slues along the walkway one can ponder journeys taken on the Underground Railroad a branch of which came up the banks of the Tombigbee with the spiritual “Follow the Drinking Gourd” as a verbal road map.
Along the walkway one will begin to see several old bar pits and foundation remains of old houses or commercial buildings.
A Confederate map shows entrenchments and fortifications extending across what is now Highway 82. An 1830s road ran from Columbus generally along the present day route of the walkway to the West Port Ferry.
West Port was a cotton shipping community across the river on what is now the Island. The settlement was devastated by a flood in 1847.
In the mid 1800s, E.R. Hopkins grew up in the Ole Homestead, my house on College Street. From the west end of the front porch one looks down on the old Main Street river landing and the present day Riverwalk. In 1936 Hopkins wrote of the sights and sounds of that landing and his childhood:
“Memory recalls the rough, weird songs, the hoarse commands of the mate, the deep tones of the boat’s bell, the hiss of steam and the splash of the paddles as the wheel turned responding to the pilot’s signal bell to the engineer.”
There was a “deckhand chorus” he recalled hearing sung by the crewmen on those Columbus steamers. The names of the boats date the chant to the 1870s.
“The William S. Holt and John T. Moor
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.”
The sounds of long ago are gone but the spirits of the past are still to be found along the Columbus Riverwalk, if one will only look.
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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