Dave’s World

1830s Land Rush Populated The Area

Last Wednesday almost 40 Friends of the Oakland Library enjoyed a picnic lunch and history lesson during an outing at Ford’s Well. It was a lesson about early transportation in Mississippi and enduring families as John Nelson intertwined his family history with early Mississippi settlement. Nelson is a retired merchant mariner and local historian from Panola County.

We forget today that this area of Mississippi was a land rush in the 1830s, Nelson explained, as his talk started at the turn of the 19th Century.

Nelson recalled the land rush was triggered by a series of treaties with the Choctaw and Chickasaw Indians. The Treaty of Doak Stand in 1820 opened the upper Pearl River counties and portions of the Yazoo River Basin for settlement. This was followed by The Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek in 1830, opening up more of the Yazoo Basin. Two years later the Treaty of Pontotoc opened up additional land east of the Mississippi River.  In a matter of a dozen years, almost the entire northern portion of the state was opened for settlement and Nelson explained people were coming here in droves to grow cotton.

Equally important for cotton-growing was the advent of river-going steamboats, boats large enough to fight the current in the Mighty Mississippi and boats small enough to navigate the smaller tributaries feeding into the big river, including the Big and Little Tallahatchie rivers, the Yocona River and Yalobusha River.

Nelson–himself a steam enthusiast with a large personal collection of steam engines ranging from an operational locomotive to a steam-powered sawmill – explained the first successful river-going steamboat in this country was launched in 1807. By 1811, a steamboat was launched in the Ohio River that traveled all the way down to New Orleans and by the 1820s steamboats were able to make progress against the current of the Mississippi. 

These steamboats drastically changed life, a three-month trip going up the big river to St. Louis or into the Ohio River now only took a matter of days. People in St. Louis were able to taste a fresh banana for the first time in their lives.

Transportation in the smaller rivers was seasonal. In the 1840s, the season was three to five months, typically from December to March, when the rivers were the highest. Boats that could carry a thousand bales of cotton were getting up the Tallahatchie and Yalobusha rivers.  Nelson said it took a smaller boat, a 450-bale boat, to travel up the tricky Yocona River.

Nelson described his great-great grandfather’s trip to the state. Garland Garfield Nelson made the trip to Old Panola (west of Batesville) on the Tallahatchie River from Kentucky. His trip would have taken him down the Cumberland River, down the Mississippi, up the Yazoo, up the Big Tallahatchie and into the Little Tallahatchie. 

Another great-great grandfather, Edward Randolph Neilson, was born in Columbus, Miss. in the 1820s. His father had settled outside of Columbus, returning to Mississippi years after being stationed near Columbus during the War of 1812. Neilson settled in an area called Bear’s Den near the Tallahatchie River, close to where the Shine Turner Bridge now spans the Tallahatchie River in Quitman County.

Randolph Neilson’s letters offered insight about life during that time, which Nelson described as a very wild and rugged area. The family always had a good pack of dogs to keep the bears out of the corn. They kept seines in the river to catch catfish, which were boiled down in big black pot and fed to the dogs.

Another letter described an unusual visitor.  A woman came to their house one time, her clothes almost torn off of her. She had been lost for a week after wandered off from her steamboat when it stopped to take on wood.  Other letters talk about mail arriving by steamer.

Another ancestor, William Hamilton came from middle Tennessee in the 1830s. Hamilton and his two brothers, Tom and Richard, had about 2,000 acres, near Bean Creek with the Yocona River as the northern boundary. The family raised cotton and operated a sawmill on Bean Creek. The Hamiltons later left the river and became more focused on Harrison Station (now Enid), as transportation shifted from rivers to railroads.

As a small kid, Nelson recalled walking around the area with his grandfather and great-uncle, looking for the area where their family had originally settled near the Yocona River. With the construction of the dam, there were few landmarks remaining. The remains of nearby town, Sardinia, which once had several stores and possibly a bank, were also gone. Now all that remains is a cemetery that bears the town’s name, located on County Road 26 off of Hwy. 32 east of Oakland.

A number of Hamiltons are buried in Sardinia Cemetery, with death dates spanning from 1843 to 1878. I remember as a teenager working with Nelson, my uncle, during the summer months cutting grass at the cemetery. I must admit that my interest at that time was the greenbacks Uncle Johnny offered for my help and not our family’s history.

I can’t say that today.