Ask Rufus: The Jenny Lind and the Freshet of 1851 In 1851, the Jenny Lind was a Columbus-Mobile packet boat that passed under the bridge at Columbus on an overflowing Tombigbee River to save 1,100 bales of cotton in a flood threatened riverside warehouse. This is an 1855 engraving of the Magnolia, a typical Tombigbee River packet boat of the 1850s. The Jenny Lind would have looked very similar to the Magnolia. Courtesy image
On February 22, 1851, the Columbus Democrat reported, “Our river has again overflowed its banks, and reached within a few inches of the great freshet of 1847.”
The New Orleans Times Picayune carried an account from Aberdeen of the 3-story brick store building of Cozart & Clark collapsing onto the next-door wooden drugstore building of Dr J Street. The paper attributed the collapse “to the effects of the recent overflow of the Tombigbee River…”
Ask Rufus: Columbus, an architectural mixing pot of style cdispatch.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from cdispatch.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Ask Rufus: A Lost Choctaw Silver Mine? The only old silver treasure I have heard of being found around Columbus are occasional Spanish or Mexican silver reales. These are the old “pieces of Eight” that were legal tender in the U.S. until 1859. They are the origin of 2 bits, 4 bits, 6 bits a dollar, 1 bit being worth 12 1/2 cents. Courtesy photo
Three years ago I wrote a column about a lost Choctaw silver mine in the Columbus or Macon area.
I told the story always assuming if there was any truth at all to the story it would have just been a hidden stash of silver and no way a silver mine anywhere near Columbus. But, of course, we all know what happens when you assume something.
Ask Rufus: A Basket of Sorrows, part 2 cdispatch.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from cdispatch.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Ask Rufus: A Basket of Sorrows Until World War I, groups of Choctaws would still travel through Lowndes County. The men would hunt and work on farms, and the women made baskets for trade. This Choctaw basket is more than 100 years old and was passed down through the Billups family, who had a farm in southern Lowndes County near where Tisha Homa, a Choctaw captain known as Red Pepper, once lived. Courtesy photo
In the 1970s, I found an old Choctaw basket in the attic of my great aunt Marcella Sykes Billups Richards‘ home in Columbus. It was not a tourist-trade basket but a well-made, reinforced work basket more than 100 years old.