Rodney

The story

Rodney was once one of the busiest ports on the lower Mississippi and, by local tradition, three votes short of being named the state capital in 1817. Incorporated in 1828, it grew into a cotton-shipping town of several thousand, with banks, newspapers, a hotel, dozens of stores, and what was said to be Mississippi's first opera house — all crowded against a bustling river landing in Jefferson County.

The Civil War left its mark literally. In September 1863 the Union gunboat USS Rattler lay off Rodney; some of its crew came ashore to attend Sunday services at the Presbyterian church, where Confederate cavalry captured them, and the ensuing skirmish put a shell in the church's brick front, where a replica cannonball sits today. The deeper wound came from the river itself: after the war the Mississippi shifted about two miles west, stranding Rodney's port on a dead channel, and the railroads passed it by.

With no river and no rails, the town withered. The governor disincorporated Rodney in 1930, and a 1938 state guide already called it 'a ghost river town.' A handful of buildings survive — the Presbyterian and Baptist churches, a store or two — among trees and farm fields two miles from a river that no longer knows the place. A local preservation society is stabilizing the churches.

What remains today

The 1830s Presbyterian church (cannonball scar and all), the Baptist church, and a few weathered commercial buildings amid fields, two miles from the current Mississippi.