It is springtime, and next week is shaping up for some pretty days. It will be the perfect time to go for a walk on the Columbus Riverwalk.
It is not only a touch of natural beauty at the edge of downtown, but it is also a place steeped in history. It is amazing that along such a beautiful and accessible paved walking trail you pass through almost 500 years of recorded history.
Some of what looks like ditches may be the remains of Civil War fortifications or even almost 200-year-old roads. Spring flowers in the woods along the walkway mark old house sites and where the bridges now span the river was once a steamboat landing. One cannot walk along the riverbank and through its sloughs and woods without thinking of the old spiritual, “Follow the Drinking Gourd.”
The song is said to be a verbal roadmap to the Ohio River for enslaved people to use in traveling along the Underground Railroad to find freedom. As we walk along, we can only imagine what it must have been like for the people on the long journey to freedom to hide in sloughs and woods such as we see along the Riverwalk.
On the riverbank at the end of College Street is a parking lot for the Riverwalk. This was the location of the early Tombigbee boat landing. The first keelboats landed near there by 1818. In March 1823 the first steamboat, the Cotton Plant, arrived at the foot of Main Street. This river landing witnessed events ranging from the departure of the ill-fated Eliza Battle in 1858 into ghostly legend to the movement of Confederate troops and supplies by steamboat during the Civil War.
Just downstream in the thicket south of the Riverwalk parking lot were several warehouses built by the 1830s, which marked the lower end of the boat landing. Off the top of the high bluff just south of the warehouses, African American engineer Horace King constructed a wooden covered bridge across the river in 1842. It was near there that one of the last Upper Tombigbee steamboats, the City of Columbus, burned in 1911.
The new Tombigbee bridge next to the 1928 drawbridge was built on the site of the 1877 iron bridge, which is also the old Military Road ferry crossing site from 1817. John Pitchlynn, the U.S. interpreter for the Choctaw Nation, described how it was the Indians’ high water crossing place. He suggested it was the best site for the Military Road ferry crossing. It also is a candidate for the crossing point to which Hernando de Soto was led by Indian guides in December 1540 as the river was out of its banks when he arrived at it.
About 1848 two Spanish cannons were found in the river here. Their origin was 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. Under the west bank of the river, the wrecked hull of the Fanny W. is said to rest. She was a steamboat owned by African American businessmen in Columbus. In 1878 her boiler exploded, catching her on fire. Though she was upriver from Columbus, her burning hull floated downstream and lodged against the riverbank across from Moore’s Creek.
There is a bridge on the Riverwalk that crosses Moore’s Creek. This creek was first known as Tan Yard Creek. By 1822 there was a tan yard about where the soccer complex is now located. Not far down the walkway is the Butterfly Garden. It is maintained by the Lowndes County Master Gardeners. In spring, summer and fall, it is an oasis of beauty. Along the walkway past the garden one will begin to see several old bar pits and remains of old houses or commercial buildings.
Walking through woods and sloughs along the walkway one can ponder journeys taken by escaping enslaved persons along the Underground Railroad a branch of which came up the banks of the Tombigbee using the spiritual “Follow the Drinking Gourd” as a verbal road map. The song begins:
“Follow the drinking gourd,
For the old man is coming to carry you to freedom.
Follow the drinking gourd,
When the sun comes back and the first quail calls.
Follow the drinking gourd,
Well the river bank makes a mighty good road.
Follow the drinking gourd.”
When the sun comes back and the first quail calls, it’s spring and time to escape and begin the journey up the banks of the Tombigbee, and then the Tennessee River following the drinking gourd which refers to the Big Dipper and North Star. It guides you to the Ohio River and freedom.
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. The Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway channel cut through the middle of the old town site creating the Island. Also, an 1863 Confederate map shows entrenchments and fortifications that encircled Columbus extending across what is now the Riverwalk to the river.
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 from 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 deckhands on those Columbus steamers. The names of the boats date the chant to 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.”
Sometimes walking along the Riverwalk in the early morning with the only sound being the rustling of leaves in a gentle breeze, you can almost hear the splashing of paddlewheels and the faint voices of deckhands singing as they loaded and unloaded the John T. Moore and the many other steamers that once landed there. It is a walk filled with memories spanning almost 500 years.
The Riverwalk is a safe, well-lit, and monitored walkway that I have been enjoying, even at night, for over 10 years and have always had a delightful walk.
Thanks to Carolyn Kaye for her help with research.
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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