Rodney, Mississippi: The River Port the Mississippi Walked Away From

01From Petit Gulf to Rodney: How a River Landing Became a Town

The ground under Rodney had a long history before the town existed. According to a state historical marker, a 1791 Spanish land grant deeded the site to Thomas Calvit. The earlier settlement here was called Petit Gulf, and it dated to the early 1700s.

The name change is also muddled. The marker says the legislature chartered the "Presbyterian Church of Petit Gulf" in 1828, and that later that year the town was incorporated and the name Rodney replaced Petit Gulf. Several other accounts put the renaming at 1814, and one says "around 1811." The marker says the town was named for Thomas Rodney, the territorial judge at the Aaron Burr hearing. A county genealogy page instead suggests Caesar Rodney, and that claim has little support. The National Register nomination for the Rodney Center Historic District dates the town's life from "its incorporation in 1828."

By the early 1830s, the marker says, Rodney had about 200 people, 20 stores, a church, a bank and a newspaper. The Mississippi River made that possible. The nomination says the town prospered after 1830 as a shipping point on the river, and it gives the boom years as 1820 to 1860. The cargo was mainly cotton. Two newspapers, the Rodney Standard and the Southern Telegraph, were printed here. Oakland College was founded about five miles to the north, and its president, the Rev. Jeremiah Chamberlain, preached the dedication sermon at the town's Presbyterian church.

02How Big Was Rodney at Its Height?

The most repeated story is that Rodney had nearly 1,000 people in the 1850s and about 4,000 by 1860. Legends of America and Mississippi Folklife both carry those figures. Another source says the town held "over 1,000" at its height. The same accounts call Rodney the busiest port between New Orleans and St. Louis.

What is documented is how fragile the town was. A yellow fever epidemic in 1843 left the village "almost depopulated," according to the Natchez Gazette / Mississippi Free Trader of October 7, 1843. Two doctors, Williams and Andrews, later published an account of the outbreak. A historical marker also cites another epidemic in 1898.

The Civil War reached the town as well. In September 1863 the USS Rattler docked at Rodney. According to the nomination, Union men attending church were captured, and the gunboat fired on the church and town. The Preservation in Mississippi account suggests that the cannonball now displayed at the church was only "allegedly" fired in 1863. It is not visible in a photograph Eudora Welty took in the 1930s. The nomination does cite a large circular hole near the church's parapet.

03What Happened to Rodney?

Rodney did not die in one blow. The National Register nomination points to a change in the river's course, an 1869 fire that destroyed most of the northern section, and a railroad. It describes "relative abandonment after 1870." The Rodney History & Preservation Society adds that a railroad through Fayette in the 1880s carried cotton shipments elsewhere. A historical marker says the 1869 fire "almost completely destroyed" the town.

The river's departure is the part of the story that sources tell differently. One account has the Mississippi shifting during the 1860s and another says about 1870. The distance it moved away is given as two miles, three miles by 1940, or five miles. All the accounts agree on the result. Rodney had been a landing, and it was left with no river to land on.

The institutions faded in turn. According to Legends of America, the last full-time Presbyterian pastor resigned in 1923. The Masonic lodge, Mississippi Lodge #56, had been in town from the 1850s to the 1920s. In 1930 Governor Theodore Bilbo issued an executive proclamation abolishing Rodney's incorporation. The town stopped being a legal entity, though it never fully emptied.

Writers and photographers noticed the town in this long afterlife. Eudora Welty photographed Rodney in the 1930s and 1940s. One of her captions in the Mississippi Department of Archives and History collection reads "Home, ghost river town / Rodney." She also made the portrait known as "Mr. John Paul's Boy" on the church steps.

04What Remains of Rodney Today

Abandoned Rodney is a quiet place, though not an empty one. Today Rodney is an unincorporated community with, in the words of the sources, "a handful" of residents. It lies about 32 miles northeast of Natchez. The Rodney Center Historic District is on the National Register of Historic Places. The district's surviving structures include:

• Rodney Presbyterian Church, dating to about 1832
• the cemetery
• the Masonic lodge
• a schoolhouse
• a commercial building
• Confederate earthworks

The church is the anchor of the place. Preservation in Mississippi calls it the only known antebellum Mississippi church built with a curved parapet. It passed to the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1966 and then fell into disrepair. A 1979 ad hoc committee was formed to plan preservation, and the Rodney History and Preservation Society is now restoring the church.

Visitors should expect an ordinary rural place. The town floods regularly. Today in Mississippi reports that the population rises sharply during deer season, when hunting camps fill the area. Away from those weeks, Rodney is a Jefferson County backroad with a church at the end of it.