Cherry Dunn came by my house a couple of months ago and showed me an interesting photo that she had. It was a tintype photo that had been passed down through her family from 150 years ago.
To say the photo was interesting is an understatement. It was a view of the now dead town of Cotton Gin Port, which had been on the Tombigbee River near present day Amory.
Cotton Gin Port along with Plymouth were the earliest and most historic upper Tombigbee River settlements. While I have written extensively about Plymouth, I have not delved as deeply into Cotton Gin Port. The story of Cotton Gin Port is a fascinating account of the European and Anglo-American settlement of the Upper Tombigbee River Valley.
The area of Cotton Gin Port first appears as the site of a small French fort in 1736. It was a staging place for the ill-fated French and Choctaw assault on the Chickasaw village of Ackia in May 1736.
On Dec. 13, 1771, British surveyor Bernard Romans canoed down the Tombigbee and, upon passing the future town site, wrote: “We passed one bluff, where the French formerly had a fortified trading house.” The French fort, though, had been short lived and was not a trading house.
In 1801, Indian Agent John McKee constructed a cotton gin on the west bank of the river across from where the town would arise on the east bank. The cotton gin burned within a year of its construction, but the site would forever assume its name.
By 1801, it was clear there needed to be a road connecting the Tennessee River with the Tombigbee. However, it was not until 1807 that Capt. Edmund Pendleton Gaines began the survey of the route from Milton’s Bluff at the Muscle Shoals on the Tennessee to what Gaines called “Gin-Port” or “Cotton-Gin-Port.” Cotton Gin Port was selected as the Tombigbee connection, as it was considered the head of keel boat navigation on the river. Construction of the road did not move forward until 1811, and it was completed in 1812.
It passed through the Chickasaw Nation without their complete approval. That approval came after Levi Colbert, a prominent Chickasaw, established and operated the Tombigbee ferry at Cotton Gin Port. In 1814, Colbert built a house on the west bank overlooking the ferry, thereby becoming the town site’s first permanent resident.
In 1816, the Chickasaw Nation ceded its interest in Cotton Gin Port. The Chickasaw cession included all Chickasaw land south of Gaines Trace to the west bank of the river.
In late 1816, Anglo-American settlers began arriving in the Cotton Gin Port area, and a settlement began to form. When Mississippi became a state in 1817, the eastern half of the territory became the Alabama territory. However, there was confusion, as the state line had not been surveyed and people were unsure of its location. Cotton Gin Port and Columbus were both believed to be in Tuscaloosa County, Alabama.
In February 1818, the northwestern part of Tuscaloosa County became Marion County. Marion County’s first county seat was Cotton Gin Port. It remained the county seat until December 1819 when the seat of justice moved to Henry Greer’s house to be nearer the rapidly growing town of Columbus. Greer’s house was at present day Columbus Air Force Base.
In January 1821, Gov. George Poindexter of Mississippi announced that the survey of the state line established that a large population on the Tombigbee that had been attached to Alabama was actually in Mississippi. That included both Cotton Gin Port and Columbus.
In 1820, the population of Cotton Gin Port was 46 white residents and three enslaved Black residents. The county seat of the newly created Monroe County moved across the Buttahatchie from Greer’s and became the town of Hamilton. This location was selected to place the county seat between the county’s two population centers.
As a gateway to the Chickasaw Nation, Cotton Gin Port flourished in its early days with a large Indian trade and settlers moving into the newly ceded Indian land east of the river. Trade on the Tombigbee also increased. Where once only flatboats, keelboats and canoes carried commerce, steamboats soon appeared. The first steamboat on the upper Tombigbee was the Cotton Plant, which arrived in Columbus in March of 1823. The following year the Cotton Plant arrived in Cotton Gin Port. On that trip in 1824, she returned to Mobile carrying 70 bales of cotton and three bales of furs. Soon Cotton Gin Port was a regular landing for steamboats during winter high water.
With increasing population, businesses, taverns and inns opened. During the 1820s and ’30s, Cotton Gin Port began to take on the appearance of a real town and not just a frontier settlement.
Foreshadowing future problems, a post rider reported in April 1824 that: “I have just returned from the Cotton Gin Port; the whole town is under water. I swam my horse a quarter of a mile before I reached the post office.”
Other floods, especially that of 1847, did substantial damage to the town. After the Chickasaw removal and Trail of Tears in 1837, the town lost its significant Indian trade and faced competition not only from Columbus but from the new and thriving town of Aberdeen, which was located in the newly ceded Chickasaw lands. These were blows from which, with railroad development, Cotton Gin Port never recovered.
The photograph was taken about 1870 and is in a family album of Cherry Watkins Dunn, whose great-grandfather was Dr. William Whitfield Watkins of Cotton Gin Port.
The role of Cotton Gin Port is best summed up by Jack Elliott in the Introduction to Cotton Gin Port, A Frontier Settlement on the Upper Tombigbee, Mississippi Historical Society, 2003: “Cotton Gin Port stands out as more than just a convenient river crossing on the Tombigbee or an early place for trading goods. Its story sums up the frontier American experience complete with Indian wars, pack horses, ferries, flatboats, primitive roads, steamboats, trading posts, missionaries, and adventurers. The colorful history and the characters that populated the area combine to make it worth remembering.”
It is a story that in a short column I could not even scratch the surface of and even left out David Crockett’s reference to the town in an 1829 speech before Congress.
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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