What’s left of that road, over which thousands of Indians were marched to their unwanted new homes, and tens of thousands of settlers poured into Arkansas to stay or to stop on the way to Texas, appears on the right side of our photograph of Mound City’s “Main Street,” where there is nothing except a long, false-fronted store building deserted, and a historical marker. It is still a dirt road.
Of all our lost cities, Mound City, which was never platted into streets and avenues, is the only one designated by the United States Department of the Interior’s Geographical Names Information System (GNIS) as not a populated place but a mere “locale—place at which there is or was human activity; it does not include populated places, and includes such sites as a landing, crossroad, ruins, ghost town.” According to the GNIS, two other states, Texas and Utah, have a “locale” named Mound City. There is a populous county seat in Kansas named Mound City. Another county seat in North Dakota is called Mound City, and still another Mound City is located in Missouri. The state of Mississippi itself is confused by having not one but two populated places named Mound City.
Then there is Mound City, Illinois. This is the Mound City, which gave its name to the ironclad steamboat sent by the Federals to put down the Rebels in Arkansas, a gunboat that became the victim of “the most destructive single shot of the War between the States” when a Confederate Captain Fry, sent to stop it near the mouth of the White River, noticed a porthole left open in its armored flanks. He fired a single lucky cannon shot that scored a bull’s-eye: it hit a steampipe within, scalding all the occupants and forcing them out on deck, where they were picked off by sharpshooters, resulting in a loss of 150 men. This Mound City sank in the White River and remained visible for many years after the war as a symbol of one of the few Rebel victories. The boat had been built at the naval yard in the Illinois town of Mound City, on the banks of the Ohio, down which had floated the man or men who may have been inspired by that “city” to give the same name to the place they founded in Arkansas.
If Missouri has its “bootheel,” then Illinois has a “slipper toe,” and this is where its Mound City is located, just above Cairo (another Egyptian name). This Mound City is also a county seat, for Pulaski County, and in addition to being the chief naval depot for the Union’s “freshwater fleet,” it furnished hallowed ground for a national cemetery for 5,555 Civil War dead. The whole surrounding area of southern Illinois is a seedbed for “locales,” a ghost-town hunter’s paradise. One of these hunters, Glenn Sneed, without the help of the GNIS, located 840 (eight hundred forty!) ghost towns in the hills of the seventeen counties that make up southern Illinois, and, without the help of any experience at writing, put together a book, Ghost Towns of Southern Illinois, a marvelous compendium of primitive literature and oral history, which no publisher would touch and which he published himself in 1977.
If this part of Illinois is a hundred miles upstream from the part of Arkansas that concerns us here, and if it is a flagrant digression to shift attention, even momentarily, in that direction, then Sneed’s labor and his naïve art beckon us with messages that shed light on the whole journey in search of lost cities (seventeen of the places Sneed found have—or had—“City” as part of their name). Traveling what must have been thousands of miles without leaving his corner of Illinois, Sneed researched as best as he could the known facts about each of the 840 places, interviewed any survivors, and wrote a précis for each lost town, concluding the pieces with variations on a theme that, strung together, make up a kind of poem to lost America:
Two houses stand. There is a single man in each house. The village that was once the home of 125 people now has a population of two. No one who had not known there was once a village there would ever guess that this was once the site of commerce.
One may drive through it without ever dreaming that it was a thriving village for ten years.
No one driving by the crossroad would ever guess that once a town was there.
Today nothing remains of the village where once lived two hundred and fifty souls.
One driving through the village knows that he is in a hamlet but he would see only the ghost of the thriving city of a century ago.
The place where the village stood has grown up in underbrush and trees and is now a wilderness.
The ghost of the once populous village roams the memories of the few folk who still live there.
Who can but tell that the ghost of this community may rise again?
In the auspicious year of 1886 le douanier Henri Rousseau painted in Paris the first of his dreamlike landscapes-with-figures-in-them, which would be laughed to scorn by sophisticated art lovers everywhere but would have an indelible influence on all attempts by modern art to seize the fickle moments of the unconscious. Certain primitive writers—Walter Lackey for his chronicles of Newton County, and certainly Glenn Sneed for his monumental exploration of ghost towns in southern Illinois—deserve recognition for handling the word with the same awkward, direct, intuitive innocence that Rousseau brought to pigment.
A traveler passing through will never know a town was there. The ghost town’s sense of melancholy reminds us of our deepest fears of never having an identity of our own, of failing to find anyone who can answer the awful question, “Do you know why I am me?” If no one knows that a town was ever there, no one knows that you were ever here.
Kim misses Mound City, Arkansas, the first time she goes looking for it. A wrong turn in a Y in the poor county road puts her on an empty, straight road, exasperatingly flat and barren except for two huge silos standing tall in a vacant field. In silhouette the silos could almost be the twin towers of the World Trade Center in Manhattan, were it not for the complete lack of anything else around them. These silos represent all that is left of “industry” in Mound City, but the dull road stretching straight to the horizon takes Kim farther away from the “city” in the direction of the Big Road, Interstate 40, that leads to the Big City across the river, Memphis. For all the emptiness of these wastes, it is an area of high traffic congestion: besides the busy six-lane interstate, three major railroads coming from the north, south, and west, the Burlington and Northern, the Missouri Pacific, and the Rock Island. No sign along their route marks the spot where the first rails were laid westward into Arkansas soil in 1853. When Kim reaches the end of this straightaway, she finds a closed-up roadside shed with a big sign, “FIREWORKS CITY,” not a city that interests her, and then, just before an access interchange to Interstate 40, a smaller sign pointing in the direction she has just come from: “MOUND CITY.” She turns around.
Again the desolate straightaway, again the Y in the road, a few dwellings—white farmworkers’, a few shanties, blacks’, sharecroppers’ or hired farm hands’—shotgun architecture of the sort that is found all over eastern Arkansas, particularly in the Mississippi delta: without lawns, or with mud for lawns, a few scraggly trees that may in summer provide shade but now are like witches summoning foreboding weather from the sky. Later, when Kim has met blacks in another town and grown accustomed to talking to them, she will regret that she could not summon the nerve to stop at one of these wretched shanties and knock at the door, if only to ask, “Is this Mound City?”
Kim passes a small church, a very tiny white church, “2nd St. John MB Church.” Is there a first St. John Church elsewhere? Or formerly on this spot? Or is the name taken from the Second Epistle of John, shortest (thirteen-verse) book in the Bible? “And now I beseech thee, lady, not as though I wrote a new commandment unto thee, but that which we had from the beginning, that we love one another.” It is certainly the shortest church house Kim has ever seen, with a belfry or tower hardly more than a rakish cap, and four white columns too plain to be even Doric. The announcement that Evening Worship is at 2:30 reminds her that in rural Arkansas “evening” is still thought to be any time after noon. The address is given as “MOUNt CitY ROad Marion ARK.” If the people of this small congregation do not know the difference between the protecting M
ound and the projecting Mount, how is Kim to find it? She drives the short way back into Marion.
Marion was named for the same Swamp Fox as the eponymous upland Marion County, where Buffalo City is located. But this Marion is the seat of Crittenden County, named after the dashing Robert Crittenden, born in Kentucky in 1797, the same year Fort Esperanza was built; at sixteen he was a soldier in the War of 1812, and at twenty-two the first secretary of the new “Territory of Arkansaw” (as it was spelled in the act of admittance). Indeed, he was the dominant figure in the early history of Arkansas politics, and was called “Cardinal Wolsey” by his friends and enemies, one of whom, Congressman Henry Conway, challenged him to a duel. Crittenden was a notoriously poor shot; urged by friends, including his second, Ben Desha (for whom the next county Kim will visit is named), to practice his marksmanship, he fired three times at a tree and missed three times. But somehow he managed to hit Conway with one lucky and mortal shot, and went on after the death of the popular congressman to dominate politics in the young Territory of Arkansas, to build the most aristocratic brick mansion in Little Rock, and to publish an influential newspaper, before his own early death, hastened by disappointment over the failure of his glamour to get him elected to Congress.
When George Fogleman (who had come in middle age from Europe to America) landed in Arkansas in 1824, the Territory was only five years old and the steamboat only seventeen, an unruly teen-ager; Carnot had just published Réflexions sur la puissance motrice du feu, that pioneer work of thermodynamics in which he showed that heat does not work unless it is let down from a higher to a lower temperature. The same principle underlies the use of nuclear energy in our own time; for Carnot’s time and for Fogleman’s, it meant the rapid development of the steam engine into a power that built the entire nineteenth century, as the combustion engine built the twentieth. Fogleman did not read Carnot; he did read the announcement that Congress had approved the sale of certain public lands for 10—an acre. Even at such an outrageous bargain price, George Fogleman could afford to buy only about forty acres of Mississippi waterfront—he was that poor—but his land was thick with virgin trees, which he began chopping down by hand and, with the help of his wife’s strong back, carried down to Fogleman’s Landing to peddle to the few steamboats that stopped. As the years passed and more and more steamboats began stopping, so Fogleman bought up more and more of the woodland, and could afford to buy a team of mules and a wagon, and a Negro slave to help. Thus he slowly founded a dynasty based on steam. Two of his grandsons became steamboat captains, as we shall see. When he died at the close of the war in 1865, having lost to freedom the sixty-five Negro men and their numerous wives and children who were his chattels, but owning twenty-one miles of the Mississippi waterfront and twenty thousand acres of land that had been cleared of its timber (the steamboats had burned up all the wood and were running on coal by then) but planted with a far more lucrative crop, cotton.
Most of the actual cities along the Mississippi, from New Orleans to Minneapolis, owed their growth to the steamboat, and all of the aspiring cities, including three named Mound and several no longer existing at all because they were swallowed whole by the fickle Grandfather, were founded upon the expectation of aggrandizement by steamboat traffic. In a lonely microcosm of its own, Mound City is the story of the coming of steam, the rise of steam, the dangerous unruliness of steam, and the evaporation of steam into nothingness. Carnot’s philosophy that heat must come down from a higher temperature to do its work applies to towns no less than to molecules.
But what sort of man was George Fogleman? Kim can find nothing on the Fogleman dynasty in the Crittenden County Library. For a moment she is tempted to ask Mrs. McCarter, the helpful librarian, “You wouldn’t happen to know of any state troopers in this district who collect local history?” But Virginia McCarter volunteers, “Really, you ought to talk to Julie Longnecker. She lives not far from here.”
Local citizens are proud of young-fortyish Julie Ward Longnecker, who has published articles on local history and recently won the prestigious Arkansas Historical Association award for the best scholarly article on Arkansas history, “A Road Divided: From Memphis to Little Rock Through the Great Mississippi Swamp,” a study of the building of the Old Military Road, which began at Mound City. When Kim phones her, Julie invites Kim over to her house, where her husband runs a day-care center, not operating on weekends. Julie is a slender, vivacious woman whose appearance suggests what Kim may resemble in another decade. History writing is only a passionate hobby for her; she works full-time doing research and statistical studies in the marketing office of a Memphis hospital.
Julie and Kim have a lunch of fried chicken snatched at the convenience store on the corner, and Julie shows Kim her article published in the Arkansas Times monthly magazine, “The Sultana: At Mound City, An Old Horror Lurks Beneath the Silt.”
“What was the Sultana?” Kim asks Julie, in all innocence.
“You don’t know, do you?” Julie observes, without censure. “Not many people have ever heard of it. You didn’t study it in your history books. But it was the greatest marine disaster in this country’s history.” She gestures eastward, in the direction of Mound City. “And it happened right out there on the Mississippi.”
Kim remembers something about Sam Dunlap, the eulogist at the funeral of Peter Mankins in Sulphur City; Dunlap had been a passenger on the Sultana, but Kim doesn’t remember having heard just how many were killed. “I thought the sinking of the Titanic was the biggest marine disaster,” she says to Julie.
“Read the article,” Julie advises. Although she has written about the Sultana and about the Old Military Road, both having connections to Mound City, she confesses to Kim that she doesn’t really know very much about Mound City itself. There is hardly any written history of it. Julie suggests that a fellow member of the Crittenden County Historical Society, Margaret Woolfolk, might have some information on Mound City, and after lunch she takes Kim to Miss Woolfolk’s house. Here, in one of Marion’s finer but still-unassuming homes, with many windows opening onto her lawn and trees and quiet street from the confines of her study, Margaret Woolfolk, age sixty-six, writes regularly for Marion’s newspaper, the Evening Times; she also uses her personal computer and its modem, printer, and associated hardware in the service of her ongoing attempts to put together a history of Crittenden County.
Miss Woolfolk is old enough to remember seeing Mound City when some of its buildings were still standing, including the ruins of the old two-story hotel. But for the last forty years or so, nothing has been there except the plantation store.
“You know, of course, that like most river towns Mound City developed primarily out of woodcutting,” Miss Woolfolk begins, uncertain of just where to begin. “They would chop timber to provide fuel for the steamboats. Mound City was but one of scores of river towns that went out of existence when the steamboats declined and the levees were built.” She goes on explaining how they were built to keep the Mississippi from flooding the rich cotton lands, and how the levee in relatively modern times dealt a final death blow to Mound City by being constructed between the city and the river, cutting it off from the river; of course, the river had already cut itself off from Mound City by shifting its course miles to the east.
“Was there ever any time when Mound City could have been called a boomtown?” Kim asks.
Margaret Woolfolk shakes her head. “I don’t think it was ever a boomtown in the sense we think of them. It was just a place where people could get on the steamboat, and for a while it was designed to service those people and those boats. It had, at most, a dozen places of business, accommodations for river passengers, a barber, and a doctor or two…but in those days we used to have doctors running out our ears.”
“In the year of, say, 1886, what would Mound City have been like?”
Margaret Woolfolk smiles. “Now, if you take that year,” she says, “it’s kind of late already. That was just before the post office o
f Mound City closed down for good.” She consults her computer printouts. “There’s no record of a post office there after 1888. And of course 1885 was the year the Mark Twain blew up.”
The steamboat of that name, not the writer, Miss Woolfolk explains, although the writer was known to blow up on occasion, too. Just opposite Mound City, the Mark Twain, which was being captained by Gustavus Fogleman, grandson of George, suffered a boiler explosion that killed two white men and seven black men. Captain Fogleman had his leg broken in two places in the accident, but returned to the ship after it was rebuilt and renamed the Alace, and continued for several more years as a pilot, before retiring to devote all his attention to his five hundred acres of cotton plantation. Gus’s wife was Mamie Barton, one of the lovely Barton girls of Mound City (his brother LeRoy married another one), but for that matter most of the Barton men married Fogleman girls. It is confusing: the Mrs. Barton who was a passenger on the Mark Twain when it blew up was Gus’s mother-in-law, but her husband’s first wife was a Fogleman, Gus’s sister.
The Bartons and the Foglemans intermarried throughout the life of Mound City. (A town is often either a tournament between two families or a marriage between them.)
James Barton, the patriarch of this family, born in Kentucky the same year George Fogleman came to Mound City, 1824, did not settle in Crittenden County until 1852, after spending enough time in Texas to earn the money to buy large tracts of land and be prominent in local politics from the moment of his arrival on the scene. He was a Union sympathizer, but when Arkansas seceded early from the Union, his slaveowner friends in Mound City, and his two younger brothers, Frank and Bob, persuaded him to shift his allegiance to the Confederacy. He organized a company of Crittenden County men over which he was appointed captain, and, near the close of the war, became major of a battalion, which he surrendered at Mound City in 1865. He was not, like his brothers, a cotton grower, but opened in Memphis, across the river, a mill for extracting oil from cottonseed. The principal use of cottonseed was the planting of cotton, and although the oil squeezed from it had been used for fuel in ancient China, it was not until Barton’s time that it became widely used as a foodstuff: James Barton helped establish an industry that grew into a major source of cooking oil, shortening, salad oil, and margarine. His brothers across the river in Mound City operated a cotton gin that supplied him with most of his raw material. However, his career as the tycoon of cottonseed oil was cut short when he was forty-nine and succumbed to an epidemic of yellow fever, from the bites of mosquitoes, which swept over Memphis in 1873, carrying away hundreds. His son, Jimmy, carried on the business, leasing thousands of acres of Crittenden County cotton, and Jimmy’s son, also called Jimmy, kept it going into the twentieth century.
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3 Page 119