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
IN 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.
During the nineteenth century, the small town had prospered on river commerce until the building of a nearby railroad shifted trade away from the river, leading to the town’s demise and the birth of the nearby railroad town of Amory. Cotton Gin Port’s inhabitants and businesses moved away almost overnight; its yards and streets, desolate, were soon turned into cotton fields and later abandoned to forest. But the place lived on in stories recalled by a few relics and by the monuments erected to its memory. The town retained an exceptional sense of antiquity within its matrix of earlier associations, including prehistoric earthworks, Chickasaw Indians, the Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto, frontiersmen, a French fort, and lost cannons on the bottom of the river. Cotton Gin Port’s story is a complex interweaving of history, place, and memory. The “facts” of history are not merely mirror-like descriptions produced by detached, “objective” individuals; the world is known only through the filters of our minds. Consequently, phenomenologists speak of the “life world,” the world as we know it, made up of not only the things that we perceive but also their deeper meanings. Cotton Gin Port, and especially two of its associations—the cannon hole and the monument—illustrate well the strong personal and social dimensions of this interplay.
The first association—the cannon hole—is, as noted, a deep bend in the river upstream from the town site, where cannons had purportedly been found during the nineteenth century. The discovery of cannons spawned a flurry of imaginative speculation, linking the guns to a legendary fort from whence, it was claimed, the cannons had been pushed into the river by French troops after a battle with the Chickasaws. Others, looking for a more ancient origin, associated the cannons with the ill-fated sixteenth-century expedition of Hernando de Soto.
“Voices” by Scott Kolbo
Lithograph
“If you have voices you’d better listen to them…”
–Flannery O’Connor
On a cold, overcast day in March 1977, I set out with two colleagues—Jim Atkinson and Susan Boyd—to find the cannons. When we arrived at the cannon hole in an aluminum johnboat, we found the water high, cold, and, as always, muddy. We had brought a long steel rod with which to probe the river bottom for cannon barrels and, given a considerable area to cover, we had devised a method for consistently probing every square foot of bottom. We proceeded to probe at relatively small, regular intervals along straight lines.
Controlling a twelve-foot rod in a slow but inexorable current was more easily conceived than accomplished, and when we occasionally struck an object, we found it impossible to determine its size, shape, or material composition. Holding the boat stationary in the current while trying to move it along precise lines was also difficult. Aware that the river channel had probably changed, we knew that, if there were any cannons, they might very well have been buried deeply under silt at the bottom of the river if not entirely under dry land. We decided that the search was futile; the waters would not give up their secrets that day.
If we had found the cannons, they might have contributed some information to scholarly history. But I knew that our trip to that secluded bend in the river was more than a mere quest for data about phenomena. Those opaque waters evoked dimensions of existence that cannot be described in ordinary discursive speech.
The other significant site is the Cotton Gin Port monument, the granite monolith resembling a large tombstone that stands on the edge of an abandoned street, accessible to only those willing to tramp through the woods to reach it. On the face of the stone is an inscription identifying the site as “The earliest permanent white settlement in North Miss.” and then linking it to the cannon hole and fort by describing it as the “Landing place of Bienville’s Expedition 1736 & De Vaudreuil’s Expedition 1752, against the Chickasaws.” The monument was erected in 1924 by the Amory chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) —significantly named the “Cotton Gin Port Chapter”— and had been dedicated in an elaborate ceremony that also featured heavily the patriotic and religious values of those dedicating it. That monument, a solid presence on the deserted landscape, evokes multiple layers of history that most scholarship disregards.
AN understanding of such layered experience and its symbols is especially important today, when some governmental agencies and private organizations promoting the “preservation” of “culture,” “history,” and “heritage” display a kind of naïveté concerning them. Traditional humanities were associated with personal cultivation, or personal transformation through broadened understanding, but today, with increased specialization this broader vision has been lost to the production of specialized knowledge through methodologies—“cognitive procedures…that aim to secure knowledge.” Their success in producing a body of knowledge transformed the university and the way in which education was conceived; but the reliance on methodologies meant the exclusion of considerable realms of reality. Methodologies stipulate what is and what is not accepted as evidence, channeling our understanding of truth into narrow categories, largely empirical ones, over which we seem to have control. As the pursuit of objective knowledge increasingly marginalized the pursuit of wisdom, it was virtually foreordained that the “cultural resources” once associated with personal transformation and transcendence would ultimately be understood as little more than mere objects of scholarly study.
The inadequacies of this education were extended into the very organizations that promote history and culture because of their “significance” or “meaning,” but with little comprehension as to what these terms mean. As Frits Pannekoek noted, we have subsequently seen the rise and dominance of “heritage professionals,” whose university education reflects rather narrow disciplinary interests, so that “heritage…is now a commodity that can be bought and sold.” Emphasis shifted away from the “spiritual” aspects of preservation to the “informational” and “material” aspects, leaving a nihilistic aura in its wake. The doyen of cultural commentary, Jacques Barzun, has observed that, although there is “more and more cultural stuff to house, classify, docket, consult, and teach…in the qualitative, honorific sense, culture—cultivation—is declining. It is doing so virtually in proportion as the various cultural endeavors—all this collecting and exhibiting and performing and encouraging—grow and spread with well-meant public and private support.” Even a standard textbook on archaeological method recognizes that “the time has come to address much wider questions: Why, beyond reasons of scientific curiosity, do we want to know about the past? What does the past mean to us?” These questions demand an acquaintance with broader horizons of human experience.
The complex interplay of experience and symbolization, according to philosopher of history Eric Voegelin, arises from the nature of history—both a process in which our lives are intertwined and the narration or symbolization of that process. In the latter regard, we often think of history as objective description by detached observers; but because we are not only observers but participants in history, our symbolizations reflect much more about the historical process than we realize. For Voegelin, ideas, concepts, and narratives are reflections of our life worlds and of deeper levels of experience, of a dynamic search for order and meaning in a common reality.
This kind of “deep examination” of the history of Cotton Gin Port can take us beyond the limitations of specialized historical methods to grapple with the nature of the underlying experience of history and place. In other words, we can embark on a quest for the true meaning of the past, which is, after all, the concern at the heart of public calls for the preservation and promotion of culture and history. To recognize that the dimensions of meaning are at the convergence of the objective and subjective, past and future, fact and mystery, the immanent and transcendent requires, as Voegelin often pointed out, more than merely assembling and interpreting facts; it requires a deep, meditative penetration into the multidimensional nature of reality as we experience it.
WHILE at face value the history of Cotton Gin Port is the history of a lost town, it also includes a string of events and places, some of which are related to the town only by virtue of their falling within the scope of the place Cotton Gin Port, a spatial construct predating many of these events and locations. The beginning of the story is thus rather open-ended, as various events, landscape features, and finds of early artifacts are linked so that the story emerges from a hazy antiquity.
The landscape of Cotton Gin Port is the product of the forces that have shaped it; it is full of “fossil remains” of these formative processes, and these remains serve as symbols, pointing to ancient origins. In this regard Geographer Philip Wagner has observed that the environment has “larger relevance as a momentary coexistence among varied presences” through which “a person may experience vicarious exposure to people, things, and places that are distant or remote in time. Environment at any instant is participation in a multitude of histories.” Consequently, for those with eyes to see, any landscape is suffused with weighty significance.
The foundations of the Cotton Gin Port landscape are geological formations, the accumulation of sediments on the floor of a shallow sea approximately seventy million years ago, later uplifted to form the Gulf Coastal Plain. Emerging from the ocean, the land was carved by erosion into valleys, hills, and streams. The convergence of two channels at Cotton Gin Port to form a larger channel created a natural landing and crossing place. East of the Tombigbee are relatively level fluvial landforms—bottomlands and terraces—that extend for miles. To the west, a narrow strip of bottom and terrace lies between the river and a high escarpment or bluff, above which are the uplands of the Black Prairie, a crescent of fertile calcareous soil that extends through Alabama and Mississippi.
Thousands of years ago Indians appeared in the area and continued to live there until the beginnings of recorded history. They left settlement remains—now archaeological sites—usually near streams. The most prominent of their remains is the Cotton Gin Port mound, located on the west side of the Tombigbee and dating to the Mississippian period (ca. 1200–1500 AD). The mound was once surrounded by a circular earthwork—probably part of an aboriginal fortification, although many later believed it to have been part of the fabled French fort.
These geological formations, land forms, and Indian artifacts provided the basis for narratives that occasionally acquired mythic dimensions because they articulated a sense of local and national identity or served as a link to our mysterious beginnings.
The earliest documented historical event that can be associated with the general region was the ill-fated De Soto expedition. In May 1539, an expedition of about 600 Spaniards under the leadership of Hernando de Soto, then governor of Cuba, landed on the western coast of the Florida peninsula. Over the course of the next four years the expedition wandered throughout the Southeast searching for mineral deposits and making life difficult for the Indians by demanding of them supplies and bearers. In December 1540 the Spaniards crossed a river called “Chicaça,” which might have been the Tombigbee, and spent most of the winter in a small village also named Chicaça. Because of the ambiguity of the contemporary narratives and a lack of contemporary maps, the location of the expedition’s route remains vague, the crossing place of the Tombigbee unknown, and so numerous places throughout the South, Cotton Gin Port included could later lay claim to being on De Soto’s route—in order to link themselves to a historically remote event.
The name Chicaça, mentioned by De Soto chroniclers, can almost certainly be correlated with Chickasaw, the name of the Indian tribal group that dominated the upper reaches of the Tombigbee during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Although the 1540 location of the Chickasaw villages is unknown, by the early eighteenth century the Chickasaws were located in a cluster of prairies known as the “Chickasaw Old Fields,” located about twenty-five miles northwest of Cotton Gin Port. By that time a trail crossed the Tombigbee at Cotton Gin Port that led to the Chickasaw’s Old Fields; this trail/crossing set the geographical stage for Cotton Gin Port’s beginnings as a river ford and landing, a frontier crossroad. As contacts between Chickasaws and Europeans increased, so did activity at the river crossing.
The first documented event at the crossing was the landing of a French military expedition and the construction of a temporary fort. This fort—or the memory of it—was to have a tremendous impact on the place’s history, for it inspired a variety of legends, many associated with the cannon hole and the Indian mound. On May 22, 1736, the silence of the Tombigbee was interrupted by the splashing of oars as a flotilla bearing hundreds of French troops arrived at a crossing on the west bank of the river, which they knew as the “upper portage” but which was probably in the Cotton Gin Port area. Under the direct command of the governor of the Louisiana colony Jean Baptiste le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville (1680–1768), the expedition constituted one of two forces sent to beat the pro-British Chickasaws into submission. At the landing, Bienville’s troops rendezvoused with six or seven hundred Choctaw warriors. The following day a small fort was hurriedly constructed, using about 600 posts, for the purpose of guarding the supplies and boats. On May 24 the force departed overland for the Chickasaw villages, leaving behind approximately fifteen boatmen and twenty soldiers. On May 29, six days after the construction of the fort, the force returned to the portage in disarray following its defeat at the Battle of Ackia and hurriedly disembarked. In most historical accounts of this event, the emphasis is on the overall campaign against the Chickasaws, its objectives and accomplishments. But in the tales about Cotton Gin Port, the campaign pales in comparison to the small, temporary fort—which became the inspiration of legends.
The site of the old fort might have been forgotten altogether if not for the English explorer Bernard Romans, who descended the Tombigbee in 1771-72 and reported passing a bluff “where the French formerly had a fortified trading house.” His hazy awareness that a French structure had been there may well have been based upon what the Chickasaws had told him; after thirty-five years of decay and vegetation growth, it is unlikely that there were many remains visible from the river. Nevertheless, his map identified the location as the “Old French Fort.” Influenced by his cartography, subsequent maps continued to identify the purported location of the fort. Consequently, the rather inauspicious site became a fairly well known landmark. When Anglo-Americans came to settle during the early nineteenth century, some knew that a French fort had been somewhere in the vicinity of Cotton Gin Port. This small piece of information must have conveyed an aura of antiquity to those who were curious about such matters.
By the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the river crossing had become the site of sporadic shipping activities associated with the Chickasaw trade, an event occurred that was of considerable importance for the site—the building of the short-lived cotton gin, which gave rise to the name “Cotton Gin Port.” 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.
In many ways the gin—like the fort—was a blip in the history of the region, with few long-term consequences. Yet consequences there were. The gin provided another historical association that would later be grafted onto the story of Cotton Gin Port and, more importantly, it provided a name for the area around the river crossing and the beginning of the place Cotton Gin Port (displacing the only other name that might have competed—“Old French Fort”). 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. Similarly, the place Cotton Gin Port arose as a concept from the flux of historical experience, providing a conceptual framework that bound together the various associations of that “place”—or those near it—into a coherent unit. Associations predating the emergence of the place were also anachronistically lumped into the conceptual category of Cotton Gin Port; for example, the fort—built decades earlier with its exact location unknown—was nevertheless readily integrated into the Cotton Gin Port story. The same could also be said of earlier associations: the mound and other Indian connections, along with speculations about where Hernando de Soto’s expedition’s crossed the Tombigbee.
A few years after the construction of the cotton gin, a frontier road—the Gaines Trace—opened, crossing the river at Cotton Gin Port. There was a growing demand for the federal government to open roads to connect areas of settlement in the state of Tennessee and on the lower Tombigbee in the Mississippi Territory, areas separated by several hundred miles of Indian territory. At the October 1805 Treaty of Tellico Blockhouse, the Cherokees authorized the construction of a road to connect the Tennessee and the Tombigbee Rivers. Two years later the United States War Department began to implement this plan; from December 1807 through January 1808 Captain Edmund P. Gaines (1777–1849), commandant at Fort Stoddert on the Mobile River, surveyed the route for a road connecting Melton’s Bluff on the Tennessee with Cotton Gin Port on the Tombigbee. The latter place was chosen for the southern terminus because of its status as an established crossing place. After departing from Melton’s Bluff at the upper end of the Muscle Shoals, the survey party proceeded southwestwardly and in January arrived at the place on the Tombigbee that Gaines called “Cotton-Gin Port,” or “Gin Port,” the earliest documented usage of the name. The only sign of human activity was a path crossing the river at a ford. Gaines found the site to be “a most eligible crossing place for a road—as well as a very suitable place for a commercial seat,” an appraisal that proved prophetic.
Although the Gaines Trace served only briefly as an interregional road, during the first years of its existence activity increased at Cotton Gin Port. During the War of 1812, the road was used to transport troops from Tennessee to the Gulf Coast, and in 1814, Chickasaw Chief Levi Colbert established a two-story log house on the high bluff west of the Tombigbee that came to be known as “Colbert’s Hill.” He presumably intended to capitalize off projected traffic on the Gaines Trace by establishing a ferry on the Tombigbee and opening his house as an inn. The son of the Scot James Colbert and a Chickasaw mother, Levi Colbert was probably the most powerful leader among the Chickasaws during the years that he resided at Cotton Gin Port.
The most important consequence of the Gaines Trace was the formation of the settlement and town that provided the crucible for the story of Cotton Gin Port. On September 20, 1816, the Chickasaws ceded to the United States all of their land claims east of the Tombigbee River and south of the Gaines Trace. These two landmarks then became the boundaries of settlement between the Chickasaws on one side and Americans on the other. By the end of 1816 a few Euro-Americans began to move into the newly ceded area to settle and farm, and eventually a town formed on the east bank where the Gaines Trace crossed the river. The relatively early beginnings of this settlement would later be used as the basis for the claim that Cotton Gin Port was the earliest permanent white settlement in North Mississippi.
The town never achieved a size of consequence; during most of its existence it usually had only about 100 people, with perhaps 200 at the peak of its development during the 1850s. Its greatest prominence (although not its greatest size) was in the 1820s and 1830s, when it served as a trade center for the Chickasaw Indians. However, with the removal of the Chickasaws during the 1830s, the growth of a plantation economy, and the establishment of other towns that eventually surpassed it in population and trade, Cotton Gin Port was left as only a secondary trade center compared to its neighbors, Aberdeen and Columbus–both Tombigbee River towns with populations of a few thousand each. However small, a developed town at Cotton Gin Port increased the site’s distinctive sense of place. Stores, offices, and other businesses were located on Jackson Street, the main thoroughfare, while a number of houses and other structures clustered around, all visually contributing to the sense of place. For the architectural theoretician Christian Norberg-Schulz, the importance of a town as a center is integral to the spatial dimension of human existence, a dimension structured on the basis of paths and goals, or in the language of geography, of routes and nodes. Here people interact and exchange goods and ideas. Cities and other settlements are “place[s] of discovery” where people dwell in the sense of “experiencing the richness of a world,” that is, experiencing the urban space as a place of “primary self-identification” because it represents the “totality in which we take part.”
Geographer Yi-fu Tuan observed that people and architectural fabric constitute cities and towns as “places and centers of meaning par excellence.” The dimension of meaning arises from the interplay of human activity, the physical characteristics of the built environment, and the conscious or internal dimensions of the society. Voegelin describes the relationship this way: Human society is not merely a fact, or an event, in the external world to be studied by an observer like a natural phenomenon. Though it has externality as one of its important components, it is as a whole a little world, a cosmion, illuminated with meaning from within by the human beings who continuously create and bear it as the mode and condition of their self-realization. It is illuminated through an elaborate symbolism, in various degrees of compactness and differentiation—from rite, through myth, to theory… .
Society and its “elaborate symbolism” intermesh with history. A community is born, develops, and dies within the horizon of history. As sociologist Robert Bellah and his associates have noted: “Communities … have a history—in an important sense they are constituted by their past—and for this reason we can speak of a real community as a ‘community of memory,’ one that does not forget its past.”
Awareness of a community may often be subliminal until individuals, moved to wonder and reflection, begin to articulate it in narrative form. In the case of Cotton Gin Port, in the inner dimension of the community a growing awareness of history was articulated in stories that eventually gave the place considerable fame in the region. Shortly after the town’s beginnings, intimations of a relatively remote past surfaced when artifacts and aboriginal earthworks were found; oral traditions concerning Bienville’s fort and the De Soto expedition also contributed. These traces from the past inspired stories, from which emerged a complex and growing phantasmagoria of lore. Because the storytellers had little scholarly training, the resulting stories were somewhat naïve, but they reflected an aura of history and its mystery with which few other places in the area could compare. Most notable in the collection of lore was the cannon hole site.
OF ALL of the cannon hole stories that developed, only a small percentage were recorded, and then often not until many years after they originated. Some of the earliest were recalled by the frontiersman Gideon Lincecum (1793–1874), who settled in Cotton Gin Port during the 1820s to engage in the Indian trade. Curious about everything from natural history to Indian culture, Lincecum was drawn to the antiquities and lore. He had heard the story of the French fort in a radically garbled version based on local legend, purported artifact finds, and relic landscape features. He described a site visit led by Levi Colbert, whom he referred to by his Chickasaw name—Itawamba:
I found by the assistance of my old friend Itewaumba [sic]…the site of the old fortification. There were sufficient signs yet remaining to show that there had been a defense made there. Pits and embankments, and rank weeds, etc. My guide informed me, that when he was a blow gun boy, he frequently visited the place and that he found bullets, scraps of iron, and the surface of the ground where the fort stood was covered with scales and splinters of burnt bone. His mother’s father told him that when they destroyed the fort, they took all the cannon they could carry, and rolled the big heavy brass guns into the river, in thirty feet of which on a low bluff, the fort was placed, and that some things thought to be useful, were buried by the claimants at various points on the banks of the river, such as spades, big chains and much lead, some boxes full of musket balls, etc. That a great number of the Indian warriors had been killed in the siege, and that they had been deposited in a mound two miles above the fort, on the bank of the river.
Lincecum decided to look for the cannons, using a method that anticipated my 1977 “expedition:”
I procured a spike pole, and in my boat, went up to the fort, intending to make a search for the brass cannons … . But on a careful examination of the premises found that the river had moved westwardly a little more than its entire width, and that what was then the bed of the river now underlay a bank of sand overgrown with birch and willow. So I didn’t sound for the guns.
Despite his own lack of success in finding cannons in the river, he concluded his story with other artifactual evidence to support its veracity:
That the old chief’s statement is true, is abundantly proven by the number of small cannon found in the Chickasaw country after they had sold their lands—their country—to the United States. I saw seven of their guns, with plenty of their balls, and some twelve pound shot, which was the cause of my attempt to search for the brass guns said to be rolled into the river. The 500 pounds of musket balls found buried in the bank of the river just below the fort, is additional testimony in favor of the statement of the chief … . The number of cannon found, and balls suited to larger guns not found, and the amount of surplus musket balls, with pits, embankments, and other signs of heavy works that were still to be seen, all go to establish the authenticity of the account given by the Chief Itewaumba.
Although Lincecum failed to find any cannons in the river at Cotton Gin Port, an 1881 correspondent of the New Orleans Times Democrat claimed that in 1835 an iron six-pounder cannon had been found in the Tombigbee River in the “gun hole (near Old French Fort),” while 900 pounds of musket balls and a silver cross were uncovered near the river bank. The cannon was purportedly removed from the river and taken to the town, where it exploded during an attempted fire. However, if the cannon ever existed, it has vanished. In 1974, a six-pound cannon ball was found at the base of the bluff west of the river. Whether or not it was connected to the cannons in the river is unknown; however, its finder—a “Civil War enthusiast” —immediately attributed a Civil War origin to the ball.
The story took an even more fanciful turn when an anonymous correspondent of the New York Herald—obviously someone familiar with the area—reported in 1880 that “Bienville’s beaten army” had deposited “cannons and [an “iron-bound”] treasure chest, containing much gold and silver” in a deep hole in the Tombigbee, clearly referring to the cannon hole. The writer recalled having been informed in about 1840 that fishermen had discovered and removed “two small brass field pieces” from the cannon hole, and he claimed that at intervals over the previous fifty years “earnest looking and mysteriously silent strangers from France [had] ascended the Tombigbee and sought the great ‘round hole’” in vain attempts to recover the treasure.
The stories of finding cannons in the river served as fodder for speculation; A. J. Pickett reported in his 1851 History of Alabama that cannons had been found in the Tombigbee “at or near Cotton Gin Port, and it has been supposed that they were left there by De Soto.” However, Pickett attempted to disassociate the cannons from the De Soto expedition, which had no cannons, while the same could also be said of the Bienville expedition. Instead, he suggested that the cannons had belonged to the 1752 expedition of the French governor Vaudreuil. According to that story, Vaudreuil had conducted a campaign similar to Bienville’s, traveling up the Tombigbee by boat, landing at Cotton Gin Port, and marching overland to the Chickasaw Old Fields, where the French army was again defeated. After hurriedly returning to Cotton Gin Port, Vaudreuil purportedly found that the level of the Tombigbee had dropped, and, Pickett hypothesized, “it is probable he threw these cannon into the river to lighten his boats.” This explanation satisfied many and consequently passed into the lore. Over a century later Dawson Phelps, historian for the Natchez Trace Parkway, proved that the Vaudreuil expedition had never even occurred; the story, developed out of these erroneous inferences, had been absorbed into succeeding texts and accepted. With the Vaudreuil hypothesis discredited, the origin of the cannons in the river—if in fact they ever existed—remains unknown, but the “Vaudreuil expedition” continues to be associated with Cotton Gin Port and the mysterious cannons.
Because of the proliferation of these and other such stories, the otherwise inconspicuous town had gained considerable notoriety by the latter half of the nineteenth century, as indicated by a contemporary historian who observed that “at no spot [on the Tombigbee River] do more of those [historical] traditions center than at Cotton Gin Port.” That the stories ranged from the likely to the wildly improbable is beside the point; what is pertinent is that the place and community of Cotton Gin Port became increasingly linked to numerous historical associations that lent it the ambience of antiquity. Just as the place and community had found their conceptual origin in the cognitive ordering of the people who lived there, these historical associations became part of the same cognitive order. As E. V. Walter has pointed out, the notion of “place” is inextricably related to the experience of space and time; the qualities of a place, indeed its very definition, are “shaped by memories and expectations, by stories of real and imagined events—that is, by the historical experience located there.”
The earliest known attempt at gathering the stories into a coherent narrative was triggered by a national celebration—the American Centennial of 1876. Before the centennial, America had been primarily concerned with progress—Manifest Destiny and the building of new settlements across the continent. Yet even while the population pushed westward, historic places such as Mount Vernon and Plymouth Rock were quickly becoming part of the national identity. Although the centennial celebration looked more to the future than to the past, the national Centennial Exhibition was intentionally held in a symbolic place—Philadelphia, “the birthplace of the nation”—where the festivities were initiated by the ringing of the bell in Independence Hall, giving history and place prominent roles. In the long term, the centennial inclined the “celebrants to self-conscious awareness of their own role in history” so that in the following decades, America saw a rise of interest in its past; by the end of the century most of the major patriotic and genealogical societies had been founded. Reflection on history played a distinctive role in the centennial celebration at Cotton Gin Port, where the key figure was Aberdeen surveyor James A. Bailey (1818-1895), who composed a speech on the town’s history for the occasion. Little is known about him; however, as a surveyor he undoubtedly knew the county well and had many opportunities to have his curiosity aroused by prehistoric artifacts, landscape features, and reminiscences of the elderly. In preparation for the Centennial, Bailey began to delve into the stories about Cotton Gin Port. On one occasion he interviewed a pioneer of the area, Dorcas Weaver Hollingsworth, and tersely recorded her memories of traveling the Gaines Trace as a child with her family to settle at Cotton Gin Port in late 1816. It was perhaps her testimony that popularized the site’s claim of being the first permanent white settlement in north Mississippi. She also related other lore, including the story of the cotton gin, which she merged with the French fort and the Indian mound stories, claiming that the gin was located within “the breast work of a fort built about 1740 [sic] by the French army under Bienville.” However, the “breastwork” was almost certainly the remnant of a prehistoric earthwork that had encircled the Indian mound—apparently neither the site of the fort nor the cotton gin.
For the Fourth of July, 1876, Bailey traveled from Aberdeen to Cotton Gin Port to deliver his “Centennial Address.” Obviously he had reasons for selecting Cotton Gin Port. Aberdeen, with a population of over 2,000, was the county seat of Monroe County and one of the largest cities in the state, while Cotton Gin had a population of only about 100. But this selection has to be seen in terms of the symbolic importance of the smaller town; as the nation turned to its birthplace, Philadelphia, Monroe County focused on Cotton Gin Port, its own “historic shrine.” Although the text does not survive, Bailey almost certainly emphasized the role of the town as the oldest settlement in the area, pushing its origins back into antiquity through links to early events and to relics, all set against the backdrop of the birth of the nation. The speech thereby confirmed to the attendees that theirs was indeed a special community by virtue of its history, its story a variant on the emerging national myth of westward expansion and the transition from wilderness to settled community, echoing mythic themes of the emergence of order from chaos.
Cotton Gin Port’s existence as a town came to an abrupt end in 1887, when the construction of the Kansas City, Memphis, and Birmingham Railroad, a major trunk line, bypassed it, resulting in the founding of the new town of Amory only three miles away. The town of Cotton Gin Port—that cluster of people and buildings that defined the community—was abandoned as its inhabitants relocated primarily to Amory, bringing with them several buildings, including houses, stores, and the Christian Church. Even the post office was moved, its name changed to “Amory.” Only a few clues were left at the site to recall that there had ever been a town: a scattering of houses that gradually disappeared with the passage of years, street beds, and some artifacts.
Because of its ties with Amory and other nearby communities, Cotton Gin Port was not forgotten; instead it made a transition from living community to mythic memory, fading from the world of everyday human activity but surviving in memory and imagination through a web of stories linked through the spatial framework of place. In the process of translation into folk memory, the town grew to a prominence that it had never possessed in actuality; its population, about 100 during its decades of existence, by the 1930s, retrospective estimates had elevated to 500.
With the growing popularity of the Daughters of the American Revolution during the early twentieth century, the women of Amory established a chapter in 1921. Standard practice was that a new chapter took the name of a person or place associated with national origins, so it was not surprising that the women took the name “Cotton Gin Port Chapter.” The image of the extinct town linked them and their relatively new hometown to a much more remote past, and one of their first projects was the erection of the monument. The thought behind the monument is described in a 1936 essay by an Amory school teacher, John Alexander Farmer:
Amory and Monroe county have in Cotton Gin Port one of the most important places of historical interest in Mississippi. It is the oldest historic shrine in North Mississippi, though now long abandoned and neglected. Many unusual events, uncommon to other localities, make this site a shrine to loyal Mississippians; a shrine that should be preserved, and its story made known to patriotic Americans…. Only a few Mississippians know of Cotton Gin Port, and a majority of the citizens of Monroe county scarcely know of its importance as a place of historic interest. It is our duty to foster and promote the building up of this shrine, and to create interest in its development.
Such images were surely in the minds of the DAR members when they contracted with the Amory Marble Works to produce a commemorative monument for Cotton Gin Port. In conjunction with the approaching marker dedication, DAR vice-regent Mrs. E. W. Flinn sought out the oldest living former resident of Cotton Gin Port—Mrs. Nancy Williamson Dilworth—and interviewed her, recording her memories of everyday life in the dead town, which were interspersed with allusions to memorable landmarks:
When I was 13, [my family] came to Old Cotton Gin Port to live. They travelled across the country in wagons, bringing their household effects with them, camped in the woods at night, lived in the wagons in the day. The Indians had all left Cotton Gin Port by that time, and it was a nice little town, with a number of families living there, and several stores … . The lovely old magnolia tree still growing on the site of the village was on the Knowles place.
We often crossed the river and went to the Colbert Hill. I’ve seen the Council Tree many a time … .
An elaborate dedication ceremony was planned for November 14, 1924. On that day, a crowd gathered on the grounds of the Amory City Hall, the political and symbolic center of the municipality, for an elaborate ritual with nationalistic and transcendental overtones. On the platform sat aged Confederate veterans in uniform and representatives of Amory’s patriotic and literary societies. This “inspiring occasion,” where “the fire of patriotism illuminated the large gathering,” as the newspaper account related, opened with an invocation by the Reverend W. R. Lott, a local Methodist minister, followed by the singing of “America.” The DAR regent then welcomed guests to the ceremony, noting that the erection of the monument “on one of the land marks of our fathers, was the fulfillment of a cherished dream that had stimulated the Chapter for the last two years.” George Leftwich then came to the podium and related the history of Cotton Gin Port, transporting the assembled guests back to the town’s early beginnings and then on to its decline and fall. When the tale came to its end, the crowd reaffirmed its significance by singing the national anthem, bringing to a close the first phase of the commemorative ritual. The attendees departed in automobiles, trailing dust on the unpaved road leading west from Amory toward the river bridge and the monument.
Upon arriving at the old town site, largely covered with cultivated fields, they found the monument waiting but concealed under an American flag and masses of flowers and evergreens. There Amory attorney Talmadge Tubb addressed the crowd, reminding them that “history is not always a matter of distant dates and places, but that it had been made on this neglected spot,” implying that their presence at the place connected them to the larger continuum of history. After Tubb’s remarks came the culminating moment of the ritual, featuring two women and two young girls, chosen because of their personal links to the past: two former residents of the extinct town and descendants of, respectively, an early settler of Cotton Gin Port and a signatory of the Declaration of Independence. They removed the flag from the monument, revealing it for all to see. Afterwards photographs were made with various participants gathered around the garlanded marker—“an honored silent sentinel, keeping guard over the memories and records of the past.” The ritual expressed the symbolic apotheosis of Cotton Gin Port; James Bailey in his centennial address saluted the town as a living community notable for its legendary and even mythic past. With the 1924 commemoration the abandoned town itself had become the mythical past. Troy, fabled Ilium, reduced to a mound of rubble by the Greek alliance, was yet for the classical world a sacred place of origins. Similarly, Amory and Monroe County traced their origins to Cotton Gin Port.
FROM the cannon hole and the monument, and all the details in between, the whole story of the place is told and recalls other such experiences and memorials of heroes and wars and the places where gods communed with men. Two trends are clearly evident: 1) the linking of associations through spatial proximity to the town, which serves as the center of the story, a center emphasized through the erection of the monument on the abandoned town site, and 2) the extension of the story backwards to include ancient origins. Two key mythical themes are the center and the origin (or beginning) pertaining to space and time, respectively.
Human beings have always used stories and images, often associated with ritual, to describe events but also to convey a sense of order within an often bewilderingly complex existence. These stories—myths—link them to a greater whole that transcends their own existence, offering a sense of a higher purpose and identity. As Voegelin scholar Glenn Hughes has observed, “the myth tells a story that makes sense of our experiences of purpose and struggle, risk and failure, desire and achievement. In short, it unites the individual and social dramas of our lives within a supervening drama of being.”
Thus myth is linked to temporal understanding: the present and future are given meaning by reference to a mythical past, the time of beginnings. Myths about beginning are symbolic forms linking us to images of worlds above the flux of the present, uniting our lives “within a supervening drama of being” and providing a sense of purpose within the change of history. Such myths used images of gods and heroes to express awareness of a transcendental ground, and these images serve as analogs for that which transcends comprehension. Similarly, the linkage to early events, places, and persons at Cotton Gin Port contains an intuition of something more—that would lead to the creation of myths and rituals and to the erection of a commemorative monument. Such an intuition led Paul Ricoeur to rhetorically ask,
Is it simply a residual phenomenon, or an existential protest arising out of the depth of our being, that sends us in search of privileged places, be they our birthplace, the scene of our first love, or the theater of some important historical occurrence—a battle, a revolution, the execution ground of patriots? We return to such places because there a more than everyday reality erupted and because the memory attached to what took place there preserves us from being simply errant vagrants in the world.
Cotton Gin Port had, at least for a time, served as a complex mythic symbol linked to the symbol of a vanished city. Its story was not merely a linear sequence of events in time but a web of crisscrossing lines and symbolic associations. Through its social and personal linkages it had connections to the residents of neighboring communities, yet it possessed the strangeness and mystery of that which has vanished and is beyond everyday reach, providing a sense of continuity and identity with the mythical Beginning, an identification that involved an imaginative and ethical response. In its lifetime it was the center of human activities and meanings. In death it faded from familiarity while simultaneously arising as a symbol of longing and aspiration.
WHEN the crowd dispersed after the monument dedication, “the silent sentinel” was left alone beside the road. It remained visible to the public for years as traffic passed by headed for the bridge on the main road between Amory and Okolona. However, during the mid-1930s the Mississippi Highway Department constructed a new highway (now Highway 278) that provided a more direct route between the two towns. It crossed the Tombigbee about a mile upstream on a new and more substantial bridge, and the old bridge was demolished soon afterwards. Consequently, the road to the old bridge was closed, leaving the monument and the town site inaccessible.
Despite the increased remoteness of the town site, calls to commemorate it continued. Following the 1948 creation of the State Historical Commission, one of the first markers the commission erected was for Cotton Gin Port. Because such markers were intended to be placed on state highways, this one could not be placed at the town site itself, and it was erected alongside Highway 278 north of the town site. The passer-by could see the memorial but not the increasingly remote original site.
The most ambitious commemorative proposal was produced in 1969, when the Tombigbee River Valley Water Management District published a feasibility study for developing a historical park at Cotton Gin Port, a project that would use both the town site and the mound site. Reflecting the misconceptions in the local lore, historian James H. Stone proposed that a replica of the French fort be constructed surrounding the mound, with a model of an early cotton gin placed on the mound’s summit. The museum was to be located on the town site beside the monument, underscoring the marker’s role as symbolic center. Exhibits were to incorporate a wide variety of artifacts illustrating the history of the area to prehistoric times. Stone placed special emphasis on finding and recovering the legendary cannons for museum display; the best technology was to be used to probe the cannon hole in the event that any still remained. The proposal failed, and the park was never built.
More recently, the state erected two new historical markers commemorating both the old French fort and the town of Cotton Gin Port. Because of my long association with the Tombigbee River, I was invited to be a guest speaker at the dedication ceremony on February 1, 1998. Due to inclement weather, the event was held in the Amory Regional Museum, a former hospital now used to interpret local history. This ceremony invoked the past far less than the 1924 ceremony, reflecting the trend toward emphasizing “just the facts.” I attempted to remedy this somewhat in my remarks by recalling that history is far more than facts, that it is something that engages us personally, calling us toward transcendent horizons. After the ceremony some of the attendees and I drove out to the river to view the markers. I walked out onto the bridge; far to the south where the river turned toward the east, I could see the cannon hole, and I recalled James Bailey. Like him, I lived in the area and knew the people. I had walked the abandoned streets, visited the mound and the Council Tree site, and plumbed the depths of the cannon hole, and, like him, I wove my impressions into a narrative that was presented at a commemorative ceremony. In sum, I found my life was being woven into the story.
Gabriel Marcel’s distinction between problem and mystery is pertinent here: A problem is a question that may or may not be solved, whereas a mystery is a quality of unknowability that is inherent in human existence itself. At the surface, or literal level, the cannon hole may be seen as only a problem to be solved using the appropriate research methods and techniques. But such investigations are often driven by more than a simple concern with problem solving, for we are driven by a quest to understand the larger and transcendental contexts of existence. Both Voegelin and Bernard Lonergan have emphasized that humans are questioners or searchers after meaning, with the capacity to “out-question the finite and the knowable and thereby to encounter transcendent meaning.” This human sense of wonder and curiosity can lead us into all types of investigation—eventually into the nature of our own existence, carrying us “from sense experience through the play of imagination to understanding and all the uses of understanding” to the revelation that “the essence of existence” is “participation in a process whose ultimate meaning transcends human comprehension.”
These questions cannot be answered in terms of material objects and causes, for as things symbolically point to their origins, that is, to the origins of their existence and the mystery of being, or, as G. W. von Leibniz put it, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” This mystery that grounds our existence is often overlooked, or as the poet Shelley stated, “The mist of familiarity obscures from us the wonder of our being.” Hughes calls this mystery a “[depth] of meaning whose hiddenness is apparent, and which could be known fully only if reality as a whole were known, while the human knower remains a participant in reality with a limited perspective, unable to fully penetrate the meanings that constitute human existence.”
For most of human history, life has been conceived as an interplay between the visible and the invisible, the concrete and the mysterious. Western thought, from Plato to St. Thomas Aquinas, was based on the cognizance of invisible aspects of reality. Reality could not be reduced to mere empirical descriptions—there was always more. Much could be comprehended only using metaphorical or analogical language. The basic facts were “regarded as surrounded by a penumbra of mystery which tends to uphold the sense that creation and history disclose, however obliquely, the depths of God himself.” However, as modernism carved out an autonomous “secular” realm of thought, it marginalized that which did not fall within the realm of its methods, focusing on what Descartes termed the “clear” and “distinct” –those objects of which we have a seemingly clear and certain cognition. In so doing, as Catherine Pickstock notes, modernism departed from the understanding that being has an “unknowable and unanalysable depth” and led to “an epistemological circuit whereby knowledge is based entirely on objects whose ‘being’ does not exceed the extent to which they are known.” Knowledge of reality was thereby restricted to a surface level of perceived objects, and reality itself was reduced to the empirical and material, resulting in an implicit, socially sanctioned nihilism.
WITH its echoes of ancient and legendary cities, the story of Cotton Gin Port implies that there is much more to culture and heritage, history and place, than the modern mind recognizes. Allen Tate, a onetime member of the Fugitives literary circle and of the Vanderbilt Agrarians, universalized such imagery in what he called “the buried city,” a symbol of the cultural achievements of the past. Heavily influenced by the thought of St. Augustine, who wrote The City of God in the aftermath of the fall of Rome to the Visigoths in AD 410, Tate explored the relationship between the accumulation of images from the past and human ideals. The City of God was Augustine’s answer to those who linked their aspirations to the earthly city of Rome, which in its misfortunes seemed far less than eternal. Both Augustine and Tate avoided reducing images of the past into merely empirical events or elevating them into symbols of a perfect golden age, while they simultaneously avoided the rejection of the past for a similarly naïve expectation of a future utopia. Instead, to them, human experience inherently involved both past and future, fact and mystery, the immanent and the transcendent. For the two men, the past provided imperfect images of a more transcendent goal; Tate’s buried city became the model for the eternal city just as Augustine’s City of Man was an anticipation of the City of God. As Robert S. Dupree observed, “The shards of the past are both remembrances and foreshadows of the community that resides in human hope and the spirit, the ‘sacrament’ of communion in a society.”
The image of the buried city recalls the depths of our inheritance from the past that are obscured by an exclusive emphasis upon the empirical. Yet today the very organizations devoted to preserving and promoting history don’t fully comprehend why we preserve and promote culture. Traditional cultivation of individuals by introducing them to higher standards of knowing and acting—the pursuit of wisdom—today is replaced with simply saving and studying old stuff, thereby undercutting the very reason for its existence. The entire foundational dimension of meaning has been lost, dimensions of mystery and the sacred are forgotten, and the pursuit of wisdom abandoned, while culture has been reduced to a naïve antiquarianism that is promoted to an unsuspecting public. As David Walsh noted,
What remains is to find the means of making the profound intimations that come to us from the past as well as from our own inner longing transparent for contemporary civilization. That is the challenge that defines the moment in which we live. Within the fragmentation of the modern world we have failed to construct our own meaning, and we are inclined to reexamine more respectfully the fragments of meaning we are left. Can the dried bones be made to live again?
I spent much of my career attempting to understand and articulate this meaning. I had grown up on the site of an extinct town near Cotton Gin Port, Palo Alto—which had been founded by my ancestors—and I had spent considerable time on the Tombigbee, canoeing with my Boy Scout troop and camping on the riverbank.
These landscapes of my boyhood were transformed as I became aware of traces from the past—relics, memories, and written records—and the place’s unseen history came to life. Although I later studied history formally, I recognized a critical omission in education offered by institutions, that reducing history to a disembodied narrative about events obscured the personal dimensions of history. I came to see the world as a surface of shifting and mysterious symbols, insights reinforced through visits to Cotton Gin Port, which became for me a meditative exploration of history and place.
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.
Copyright 2004-2005 :: The New Pantagruel 1.4.