Grand Gulf

The story

Grand Gulf was one of the great cotton ports of the antebellum Mississippi. Incorporated in 1833 on a bend of the river in Claiborne County, it was shipping more cotton than any town in the state except Natchez and Vicksburg by 1835. At its height in the 1850s it held well over a thousand residents, with two churches, a theater, a hospital, a cotton press, and wharves crowded with bales from three counties.

Few American towns were hit by so many separate disasters. Repeated yellow fever epidemics thinned the population; a tornado in the 1850s flattened part of the town; and the Mississippi began caving the bank and swinging west, swallowing the business district and stranding the port. Then came the Civil War — the town harassed Union gunboats and was burned in reprisal, and in April 1863 it was the scene of the Battle of Grand Gulf, when Confederate guns in Forts Wade and Cobun held off Grant's fleet during the Vicksburg Campaign.

By the end of the century the river had left for good and only about 150 people remained. The site is now Grand Gulf Military Monument Park, which preserves the fort earthworks and gathers a museum, an observation tower, and relocated historic buildings — a church, a dogtrot house, an old cemetery — into a memorial of a town that the river, the weather, and the war all took turns destroying.

What remains today

The earthworks of Forts Wade and Cobun, a museum and observation tower, and relocated historic buildings and a cemetery, in Grand Gulf Military Monument Park.