CottonGinPort, Fading Memory, MonroeCounty Legend
CottonGinPort is an abandoned town on the upper TombigbeeRiver in Monroe County Mississippi. It was located at the spot on the muddy Tombigbee at a high point of navigation, at the intersection of Chickasaw trading paths, and it was one of the first white settlements in North Mississippi.
There are a lot of historical facts known about Cotton Gin Port. The ferry was in operation by 1803. Gaines Trace was opened as a road connecting CottonGinPort on the Tombigbee to Colbert’s Ferry on the Tennessee in 1810, surveyed along an old Chickasaw trail. The town was incorporated by the Mississippi Legislature in 1838 and reached its height around 1848, at which time it had a carding factory, a flour mill, twenty stores, and a population of approximately five hundred. The flood of 1847-48 damaged the town, and it never really recovered. CottonGinPort died in 1887 when the Kansas City, Memphis and Birmingham railroad laid its tracks three miles east and proceeded to sell lots for its new planned town of Amory. In 1971, the Mississippi Department of Archives and History submitted a nomination form to have the “Cotton Gin Port Site” listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
These are verifiable facts, and these alone would make CottonGinPort an important historical site. It was one of the oldest, if not the oldest, white settlements in North Mississippi. It was a trading post with the Chickasaws. It was a contender for county seat when MonroeCounty formed in 1821. It was a seat of justice, a post office, and a stage and wagon hub.
But the legends about the CottonGinPort site are even more interesting and give to the place a sense of deep mystery.
The Mississippi Historical Society published Cotton Gin Port: A Frontier Settlement on the Upper Tombigbee, by Jack D. Elliott, Jr., and Mary Ann Wells in 2003. Elliott has written extensively on the meaning of place in the history and legends of Cotton Gin Port.
He wrote: “Far more than most place names, Cotton Gin Port is illustrative of the interplay between time and space with its overt linkage of a historical association—the cotton gin—and the place’s geographical focus—the port, or river crossing. Places—as opposed to empirical objects or abstract space—are “center[s] of meaning constructed by experience,” in the middle range between location in space, on one hand, and “visceral feeling,” on the other.”[1]
The legends surrounding the Cotton Gin Port site extend back into the mists of time and the legends, as much as the history, gives us a sense of place, deeply rooted in the experience of the people of MonroeCounty.
Since Cotton Gin Port itself no longer physically exists, the myths and legends that are attached to it might seem like the false regionalism that Wendell Berry described when he wrote, “… when the myths and abstractions of a place are valued apart from the place itself; that is regionalism as nationalism.”[2]
However, the legends that have arisen around CottonGinPort reveal much about the people of the place, and the way that this particular place, in history and in geography, informed their lives. Further, these are the “personal histories” of the people of MonroeCounty, the local historians, the storytellers. This is truly “local life aware of itself.” [3]
A sense of place infuses the story of Cotton Gin Port. It is such a specific geographical place, and its geography shaped its history and its legends. It was the highest navigational point on the upper Tombigbee, except at certain times of high water when a steamboat might reach to Camargo, another abandoned town fallen to the railroad, on Town Creek. This geographic characteristic shaped the economic destiny of this place: it was a river port for flatboats and then for steamboats shipping goods down the river to Mobile. When the railroad eliminated that need, the port ceased to exist.
It was a point where it was apparently easy to cross the TombigbeeRiver, since several Indian trails did that and it became a ferry, a point on Gaines Trace which was surveyed for the United States government, and a one-lane iron bridge.
It was a place sacred and practical to the Chickasaws. They had a village on the bluff west of Cotton Gin Port. They had a mound in the floodplain west of the river. The United States government built the cotton gin here to please them. Tecumseh came here to persuade them to fight the Americans. BellMissionSchool was founded here to reach them.
So the geography of the place infused it with meaning. The geography shaped the use of the place, shaped its settlement patterns, and shaped its economy.
Mother Monroe
The history of MonroeCounty, one of the largest in the state of Mississippi, is kept alive through her people. Everyone is a local historian, a storyteller, a keeper of tradition and legend.
William T. Miles, editor and publisher of the Amory Advertiser which compiled a history of MonroeCounty for the American bicentennial in 1976, wrote in the foreword of the published book, “MonroeCounty… rich in history, legend, people, and land… This literary effort does not claim to be a learned work but it is valuable because the sources, while usually documented where possible, do rely on material which may have been handed down from generation to generation through folk tales, hearsays, and legends.”[4]
Although the Advertiser printed hundreds of extra copies of the original tabloid newspaper section, they could not keep enough copies on hand, and decided to print a more permanent edition in a hard-bound book. The contributors to the special edition were usually local historians. Every little community in the county contributed something, and the stories presented were anecdotal. They wrote about their communities, the businesses, the schools and the churches, both black and white.
CottonGinPort played a supporting role in Miss Lucille Rogers’ piece, “Amory was Mississippi’s FirstPlannedCity.” The first third of her story honors Cotton Gin Port and the article opens with, “Amory has a unique and rich history. Its history is inextricably linked with that of historic Cotton Gin Port, the first White settlement in North Mississippi.”[5] Thus, the first sentences of the collection of articles links back to Cotton Gin Port.
The article on Cotton Gin Port separately that appears in this collection is a reprint of one written by Dr. W. A. Evans, an amateur local historian who made some wonderful contributions to Monroe County historical efforts.
William Augustus Evans was born in 1865 in Marion, Alabama, but moved with his family to Aberdeen, Mississippi as a young boy. His father was a doctor, and also a planter who owned quite a bit of property west of Aberdeen in addition to one of the great antebellum homes that line High Street. Evans was a member of the first graduating class of Mississippi A & M (now MississippiState). He became a doctor, practicing public health in Chicago. He became Chicago health commissioner, pioneered pure water and milk laws there, and wrote the first syndicated health column in the United States called “How to Keep Well” in the early 1900s. He retired to Aberdeen in the early 1930s and took up the practice of local history. He gave the city of Aberdeen Evans Memorial Library.
He prevailed upon the editor of the Aberdeen Examiner to reprint a series of letters that had been published in an early Aberdeen weekly newspaper in 1877 – 1879 called “Pioneer Times in MonroeCounty.” These early letters had been written by another retired amateur local historian, W. B. Wilkes and give lively descriptions of life in a young MonroeCounty. These letters were reprinted in the Aberdeen Examiner in 1936, 1937, and 1938.
Evans contributed “a series of historical sketches of MonroeCounty” called “Mother Monroe.” These short articles, the first of which described and explained W. B. Wilkes’ “Pioneer Times” letters, covered the communities, people, and places of MonroeCounty and many of them were subtitled “Some Facts and Some Probable Facts.” This series also ran in the Aberdeen Examiner during 1936, 1937, and 1938, along with a series on “Who’s Who in Monroe County Cemeteries” for which Evans recruited Boy Scouts to help him find and transcribe the tombstones in the cemeteries in MonroeCounty.
Evans began his narratives in 1821, the year MonroeCounty was organized by the state legislature although not very organized on the ground. In 1821, the Chickasaw Indians still occupied the lands west of the TombigbeeRiver, and that was a large portion of the present day county.[6]
The Chickasaws
CottonGinPort was located where a major Chickasaw trail crossed the Tombigbee in the shadow of a Chickasaw village where one of their most important chiefs had a home. A sizeable Chickasaw long town, home of an Indian chief named Levi Colbert also known as “Itawamba Mingo,” sat on the bluff west of the river. The trail which was later surveyed by the Americans as “Gaines Trace,” ran to Colbert’s Ferry on the Tennessee River.
Across the Tombigbee and half a mile north of the ruins of the Cotton Gin Port ferry, a flat mound stands in the middle of a soybean field. Artifacts found here prove that the surrounding area was inhabited as early as 600 B.C., possibly earlier. This region was one of a number of large centers of Mississippian culture in the TombigbeeBasin. The mound itself was built during this period, dating from 1000 to 1700 A.D., by the ancestors of the Chickasaw Tribe.[7] In area the mound measures about fifty yards square and is elevated over eight feet, clearly above high water level.[8]
The location meant a great deal to the Chickasaws.
Hernando de Soto is thought to have been the first European to travel through North Mississippi. He was thought to have discovered the Mississippi River at Memphis.
According to tradition, the Spanish crossed the upper Tombigbee a few miles south of CottonGinPort on December 17, 1540. They called this territory the “Province of Chicaza” and captured Chickasaw hostages to insure a truce with that tribe. The land was described as thickly populated and prosperous. The intruders spent four months with the wary Chickasaw, wintering in a fortified village called Chiasahha near Pontotoc. When de Soto prepared to continue his journey in March, 1541, he demanded two hundred warriors to serve as bearers for his entourage. The outraged tribe responded with a night attack, killing forty of de Soto’s men and fifty horses as well as a goodly portion of their swine.[9]
The legend goes that the Chickasaws kicked his butt and sent him packing, and that he discovered the Mississippi on the run.
In the 1930s, a Congressional commission explored Hernando de Soto’s path through the Southeast. The commission was led by Dr. John R. Swanson of the Smithsonian. The Swanson commission came through MonroeCounty attempting to place de Soto’s route and mark the conquistador’s crossing of the TombigbeeRiver. The final report identified CottonGinPort as one of three probable locations. For many reasons, few necessarily geographical, the commission decided that de Soto probably crossed the Tombigbee close to Aberdeen, the county seat. This was a very controversial thing in the 30s, with people taking sides vehemently.[10]
In the spring of 1736, the French governor Bienville came up the river from Mobile to attack the Chickasaws and their English allies at Ackia (near Tupelo). The TombigbeeRiverwas navigable to this point. Here, Bienville and his men disembarked, set up a makeshift palisades-type fort, and left extra cannon before heading up to Ackia. They were soundly beaten, retreated hastily to the river and headed back to Mobile. In fact, the French made the same disastrous excursion along the same route twice.
This is how the legend of the Old French Fort began. Some placed the location of the French “fortified house” on top of the temple mound in a field west and slightly north of the port site. Some placed it closer to the river bank. An enduring legend says that the French left in such a hurry that they dumped cannon and cannon balls into a hole by the river, forever to be known as “The Cannon Hole.”
Captain Bernard Romans, a surveyor for the British, wrote in A Concise Natural History of East and West Florida that on December 13, 1771, he and his party passed the bluff “where the French formerly had a fortified trading house, about one mile below the mouth of the creek [Town Creek], on the west bank…”[11]
W. A. Evans wrote, “A correspondent of the New Orleans Time Democrat … wrote in June 16, 1881, ‘An old iron six-pounder cannon was found in gun hole near old French Fort in 1835. It exploded when being shot at Cotton Gin. Nine hundred pounds of lead ounce balls and a silver cross buried near the bank of the river was also found.’ The writer has found no evidence that this cannon exploded in Cotton Gin.”[12]
But the legend of the buried cannon continues.
Jack Elliott writes of visiting the Port site in 1975, that they “passed—or so we thought—within the shadow of an eighteenth-century French fort site and paused briefly at the “cannon hole,” a deep bend where a number of guns were supposedly abandoned by a retreating French force,” and he writes of returning in 1977 for a fruitless search of what they thought was the cannon hole.
He ended his article with:
In particular the cannon hole, where the surface of the water beckons with the prospect of an unseen depth, was a potent symbol, exemplifying that “enormous weight of representation, or symbolism” inherent in the landscape that, according to Philip Wagner, provides “vicarious exposure to people, things, and places that are distant or remote in time.” If the search for cannons was at one level merely a search for material objects that may or may not exist, at another level the cannon hole said much about our relationship to history, pointing to that which is beyond the empirical and the discursive—to the realm of mystery.[13]
In about 1801 or so, the United States government built a cotton gin for the Chickasaw who lived on the bluff above the crossing. The cotton gin was located on the west side of the river, probably on the high bluff where Levi Colbert made his home. The Americans hoped to improve relations with the Chickasaw who had been allies of the English, and to encourage the growing of cotton.[14] According to one legend, the cotton gin was a gift from George Washington himself to one of the Colbert Chickasaw chiefs.
The exact location of the cotton gin is unknown, but it was probably built on the high bluffs southwest of the Old French Fort where a number of Indian trails converged, near where Chickasaw chief Levi Colbert had a home in a sizeable Indian village. Some legends say that the cotton gin was constructed within the old fort itself, however, anthropologists have discounted that legend.[15]
Evans wrote, “It is the general belief that the United States built a cotton gin on the site of the Old French Fort somewhere about 1801 and, because of that fact, the bluff on the opposite side of the river, a good boat landing place, was named CottonGinPort by someone unknown. The writer has delved butso far without success to find confirmation of this tradition for such it verily is.”
He also quoted a report by George J. Schultz, acting Director Legislative Reference Service, Library of Congress, “Although all these documents indicate clearly that a cotton gin was constructed by the Federal Government for the Chickasaws at CottonGinPort, a careful search has failed to reveal the legislative procedure under which this gin was established.”[16]
About the existence of the cotton gin, Elliott had a lot to say and a lot of details.
The gin was constructed in 1801 under the supervision of Indian agent John McKee as a part of the federal government’s policy of encouraging the Indians to adopt commercial agriculture as an alternative to their traditional combination of horticulture, hunting, and gathering. Gin components were purchased in Natchez and hauled for hundreds of miles to the river crossing, which was accessible to the Chickasaw settlements and provided a means of shipping the ginned fiber downstream to Mobile. A gin house was built, and the gin began its operation. The Chickasaws were not able to use it for long, however. Possibly angered at not receiving a gin themselves, a group of Choctaws set fire to the gin house, reducing it to ashes within minutes and retarding plans for encouraging cotton culture among the Chickasaws.[17]
The cotton gin saw little use, however, since it was burned in a few months time. Elliott said a raiding band of Choctaw burned it in jealousy because they didn’t get one. Some say the Chickasaw in a fit of “ungratitude” burned it themselves, and others say it was a regrettable accident. [18]
When the Creeks were fighting the Americans, legend has it that Tecumseh came to this place to speak to the Chickasaws and enlist their support in 1811, beneath a large tree referred to as the Council Tree on the bluff near Colbert’s home. There is a concrete marker beside the road up the hill. The council tree was also destroyed by fire, some say it was struck by lightning in the late 1800s and others say careless boys camping under the long dead tree burned it accidentally in the early 1900s.