Vicksburg and Davis Island, Mississippi

First timer? In this formerly once-a-day blog (and now pretty much a once-a-week blog) I use an app that provides a random latitude and longitude that puts me somewhere in the continental United States (the lower 48).  I call this “landing.”

I keep track of the watersheds I land in, as well as the town or towns I land near.  I do some internet research to hopefully find something of interest about my landing location. 

To find out more about A Landing A Day (like who “Dan” is) please see “About Landing” above.  To check out some relatively recent changes in how I do things, check out “About Landing (Revisited).”

Landing number 2575; A Landing A Day blog post number 1020

Dan:  Today’s lat/long (N32^o 9.805’, W91^o 9.571) puts me in southwest Mississippi:

Check out my local landing map:

You don’t need a degree in geology or hydrology to figure out that I landed in the Mississippi River watershed (1,000^th hit). Wait a second!  This is it!  My thousandth Mississippi hit!

As my regulars know, I’ve been doing a countdown to my 1,000^th Mighty Mississippi (MM) landing for quite some time.  And isn’t it simply amazing that my thousandth is right next to the river! 

OK, OK, a little skepticism from the ALAD nation is warranted.  True confessions: 

About a month ago, I landed at this location.  It would’ve been my 997^th MM watershed landing, but, with an unprecedented sleight-of-hand, I simply inserted a bunch of rows above this landing on my spreadsheet, and patiently waited until I finished my 999^th hit.  I figured it would be appropriate to make this particular spot my 1000^th MM landing.

After my 999^th MM landing (Toonerville CO) but before I could catch myself, I inadvertently landed in Oregon rather than simply skipping to today’s location.  Regardless, here I am practically on the banks of the MM, ready to pay homage to Old Man River.

Here’s my very local streams-only map:

Wow.  What jumps out is the crazy state boundary that seems to have little to do with the MM.  To confuse things even more, I add some state labels:

Bottom line:  there’s a little Louisiana east of the MM, and quite a hunk of Mississippi west of the MM.  It’s apparent that the boundary was determined way back in the day; the river changed course; the boundary stayed the same.

So, the original river course was mostly where Palmyra Lake is today (so Palmyra Lake is an oxbow lake).  A little research determines that a heavier-than-normal spring flow in 1876 bypassed the awkward meander, cutting a new, more direct channel. 

Here’s an excellent YouTube piece about the formation of meanders and oxbow lakes.  It’s quite elementary, but I actually enjoyed the methodical, clear way the teacher presented it. 

A similar thing happened up near Vicksburg, but with greater socio-economic consequences:

Prior to 1876, Vicksburg was on the banks of the MM.  With its contrary nature on full display, the MM changed course, leaving Vicksburg high and (nearly) dry.  The economy of the town was based almost entirely on river traffic, so this was a real problem. 

Back before 1876, the Yazoo River discharged to the MM a little ways upstream from Vicksburg:

In 1902-03, the Yazoo Canal was dug, connecting the Yazoo River to the recently-formed oxbow lake next to Vicksburg, thereby revitalizing the waterfront.  The former Yazoo River channel (below the canal) was abandoned.

Here’s today’s streams-only map around Vicksburg:

 Getting back to my landing, GE let me know that I landed on Davis Island:

You can also see the photo icon (posted by Kevin King); upon which of course I clicked*:

*What an awkward turn of phrase! But I kind of like it . . .

So I have a few things to check out:  Davis Island, the Brierfield Hunting Club, and some ruins.

I found a great article in EdgeEffects.net.  Edge Effects?  Well, here’s what they say about themselves:

Edge Effects is a digital magazine produced by University of Wisconsin graduate students at the Center for Culture, History, and Environment.  Edge Effects was founded in 2014 and offers a wide array of content relating to environmental and cultural change across the full sweep of human history.

The title of the 2014 article (by Brian Hamilton) is “Davis Island:  A Confederate Shrine, Submerged.” It’s a lengthy article; I took some editorial liberties for brevity. I think it’s well worth a careful read:

“It would be a shrine of the nation—if the South had won the war,” insisted the man offering admission to the Old Courthouse Museum in Vicksburg, Mississippi, which advertises its collection on its website by highlighting “Confederate flags, including one that was never surrendered.” It also boasts “the tie worn by Jefferson Davis at his inauguration as Confederate President.” The “Confederate Shrine, Submerged” was Brierfield, Davis’s plantation.

Brierfield was one of several plantations—including those of Davis’s eldest brother, Joseph—located on what was known then as Davis Bend, an eleven-thousand acre peninsula of rich bottomlands, bounded on the north, west and south sides by the Mississippi River.

In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, Davis Bend, with its fields of flowering cotton, sat squarely on what historian Walter Johnson terms “the leading edge of the greatest economic boom the world had ever seen.”1 It was there that the Davises made their fortunes. It was there, along the hedgerows of his wife’s garden, that Jefferson Davis was presented with the news of his election as his new nation’s president.

The conditions of Confederate surrender included no ban on Confederate shrines. One can go to Richmond and visit the White House of the Confederacy, out of which Davis operated. Or one can gaze up at Davis atop a horse carved in light relief into the bald face of Stone Mountain, just outside of Atlanta. Or one can stand in the shadow of the obelisk—the world’s third largest—marking his birthplace in Fairview, Kentucky.

So why no shrine at Brierfield? Visiting today, one cannot help but think it has much less to do with history and much more to do with the Mississippi River.

In March 1867, after a particularly snowy winter and wet spring in the Ohio Valley, the river leapt its banks and took a short-cut across the neck of Davis Bend, creating the island it is today.

The 1867 flood was not the problem of Jefferson Davis, who was in prison, or Joseph Davis, who was in his eighties and residing in Vicksburg. Left fighting the rising waters were the formerly-enslaved family of Benjamin Montgomery, owned by Joseph Davis.  The Montgomery family was joined by a company of former slaves with whom he had succeeded in obtaining a $300,000 nine-year mortgage from Joseph Davis for the Davis family plantations.

[$300,000?  Nine years?  Ignoring interest, it would be $2800 a month (about $3,500 with 5% interest).  That’s a high mortgage payment today!]

They struggled with shovels and mules to make their sixteen miles of levees hold against high water in 1867, 1868, 1871, and 1874. But though Montgomery & Sons succeeded in creating one of the most profitable cotton operations in the state in the early 1870s, the battle against the river led the younger Montgomerys and their associates to seek out drier ground north in the Delta and in western states after their father’s death in 1877.

The land reverted to the now-free Jefferson Davis, who then saw his profits erode with his levees [great line!], and after a sixteen-year stretch featuring nine springs of destructive floods, his heirs ceased crop productions and leased their holdings for pasturage. The 1922 flood brought water six feet deep into Brierfield, leading them to invest in raising the mansion up onto brick columns, which managed to save it from the infamous 1927 flood—but not a chance fire in 1931, which consumed all but its stonework.

[Scroll up and take another look at the picture that shows the ruins.]

Yet the Davis family retained the ruins and the property as a family shrine, if not a national one, until 1953, when they sold it to two men who flipped it the next year to a lawyer in Vidalia, Louisiana who chose a relatively flood-proof land use: hunting.

On Davis Island, forty years of light use ushered in revivals of briar, forest, alligators, deer, and even bear.  The Vidalia lawyer’s heirs are proud custodians of the historic sites but they are not interested in being groundskeepers.

[During a tour of Davis Island, the author’s] gregarious host turned sheepish when we approached the Davis Family cemetery, its headstones having been rocked this way and that by flood after flood and cocooned in thick grass. “I’m sorry we haven’t kept it up,” he apologized.

What remains of the headstone marking the grave of Joseph Davis, who purchased an immense tract of rich Mississippi bottomland with abundant river frontage in 1818. He sold thousands of acres off to friends and gifted what would become Brierfield to his youngest brother, Jefferson. Benjamin Montgomery, who managed Joseph’s plantation while enslaved and bought and ran both plantations for twelve years after the war, is also buried on Davis Island, but his grave has not been located. (Hamilton, 2014)

But there is no reason to tend these sites—this island is no shrine of this nation or any other. They sell no tickets. Rather, one must be invited onto Davis Island, and such an invitation is hard to come by, as the Brierfield Hunting Club has no website, no email address, and no phone number.

The club’s concern is not preserving history, but conserving deer. In this, too, water presents obstacles. In response to the 1927 flood, the Army Corps of Engineers constructed massive levees up and down both sides of the Mississippi River. But the Corps surveyors judged Davis Island too small and insignificant to barricade.

The sixty-foot levee raised by the Army Corps of Engineers on both sides of the river in the wake of the 1927 flood, leaving Davis Island (down to the right) susceptible to even higher waters. (Hamilton, 2014)

The huge levees left the land not just unprotected but newly threatened, as their existence meant higher flood levels for the land in between.

In 2011, the island’s highest point sat beneath eight feet of water. These waters have repeatedly rushed into the elevated, and in some cases elegant, hunting lodges, forcing costly restorations. The deer survive only by swimming to dry land, but the exertion can claim part of the herd and suppress reproduction rates.

The outcome of the Civil War transformed the nation; and subsequent battles about what it all meant have been present in American life ever since, with combatants erecting shrines—in stone, in print, in celluloid, in law—and tearing them down.

Yet Brierfield was lost to neither the Civil war nor the culture wars that followed, but to the river.

Here’s one last picture from the article, of Palmyra Lake:

Palmyra Lake, like the many chutes and oxbow lakes along the Mississippi-Louisiana border, is home to alligators, like the one pictured and the one that just slipped beneath the surface to the right. Rarely seen fifty years ago, they are now so plentiful that locals report that game wardens rarely punish those who hunt them out of the three-week season in September. (Hamilton, 2014)

I’m going to close with two shots of the I-20 bridge over the MM at Vicksburg.  First this, by Mikie Richards:

And then this, by James Butterworth:

That’ll do it . . .

KS

Greg

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