the New Pantagruel

The Buried City: A Meditation on History and Place

by Jack D. Elliott, Jr.

A longer version of this article was published in the Journal of Mississippi History 66 (2004): 106-50 and was recently awarded the Willie Hallsell prize for the best article in the Journal of Mississippi History for 2004.

Look now at the city of which these most glorious things were spoken. On earth it is destroyed: it has fallen to the ground before its enemies; now it is not what it once was. It has delineated an image: this shadow has passed its meaning on to somewhere else.

–St. Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos

History…subsumes and transcends the otherwise somewhat paltry present. Yet at every moment also human life subsumes and transcends history, or what for the mundane secularist passes for history: the movement of things and of ourselves through time. To be a human person is to live in the complicated intersection between the eternal, as it is sometimes called, and time-and-place: between the infinite, more or less dimly perceived, and the moving stream of the mundane….

–Wilfred Cantwell Smith

I.

N NORTHEAST Mississippi, tributary streams cut through Cretaceous-period geological formations before joining to form the main channel of the Tombigbee River, which then meanders southward toward the Gulf of Mexico. For millennia the river has served as a highway, and human activity still converges at cities located at old river crossings. Along the river are relics of abandoned settlements such as Indian village sites, mounds, and extinct river towns. These sites go unrecognized by most people, but for some they recall a distant immensity of time and existence. One of the extinct towns, Cotton Gin Port, was located below the confluence of two major channels of the river at an old crossing that probably dated to prehistory. Today there is little physical evidence that a settlement existed there over a century ago.

My first visit to the town site was on December 5, 1975, when Jack Wynne, then assistant professor of anthropology at Mississippi State University, and I unloaded my wooden canoe at the landing on Highway 278 and set out downriver the mile or so to the site. Along the way we 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. Staring into the water, we could see nothing beneath its muddy, swirling surface, and we passed on. Shortly after we crossed the old Gaines Trace, we saw two pairs of concrete piers towering over the river like enormous columns of a forgotten ruin, the only sign of the town visible from the river. They once supported a large truss bridge that was built in 1914, then abandoned and demolished in 1937 with the construction of a modern highway bridge. The river crossing at Cotton Gin Port was far older than the bridge; long before the bridge there had been a ferry, and before the ferry, a ford—to what era the ford dated, no one knows.

We climbed up the riverbank and found the site covered in forest growth, with no trace of buildings or roads, but a desultory walk revealed sporadic traces: a street bed, scattered potsherds, bottle fragments, and rusty nails, along with a few piles of brick rubble from collapsed chimneys. A lone granite monument was conspicuous—erected decades ago to commemorate Cotton Gin Port. These remains provided fodder for the imagination; history has the power to open a dimension of mystery in such an otherwise everyday landscape.

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