Mississippi Delta, Part 1

 For our Spring Break trip we traveled to the Mississippi Delta, starting in the Mid-South and ending up in the Deep South. Most folks will have never spent 3 nights in Arkansas or Mississippi, but as we continue to learn on our explorations of America, there is beauty and wonderful people everywhere in this country.

We started our trip in a city at the junction of many 'villes. Can you figure out where this is?

Sign from the airport in BNA, where they're proud to encourage consumption of hard alcohol. Nassau Bahamas owns the NAS airport tag and Nashville TN has to settle for BNA.

Our first stop was Fort Donelson, TN, which is where Ulysses Grant started his rise to the top of the Union Civil War leadership by capturing several forts on the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers.

Rarely do we visit park sites in chronological order, but this time we traveled south to Shiloh, TN for the next engagement of Grant's army. The April 1862 battle produced >23,000 casualties, more than all of America's previous wars combined - the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and the Mexican War.

Caroline just earned her driver's permit and turns out that National Battlefields are a great place to learn to drive. They feature low speed, one-way roads, with no obstacles beyond the occasional cannon or stone memorial. Caroline racked up a couple hours driving in Fort Donelson, Shiloh, and Vicksburg.

Shiloh takes its name from a small church meeting house in the middle of the battlefield. A United Methodist Church still stands there as well as this log church reconstruction, complete with a bird's nest in the pulpit.

There is more to see at Shiloh than the battlefield 

Tessie and I had visited the Chickasaw's resettled lands in OK and now we could walk in their homelands in TN

We had been to Mississippi for a few hours back in 2014, but now we were ready to spend more time there.

After Shiloh, the next engagement of Grant's troops was in Corinth, MS, which like Vicksburg, Chattanooga, Atlanta, and Richmond, sat at a strategic railroad junction. The battlefield in Corinth was overtaken by the town years ago and now the attraction there is a large Civil War museum.

Where was the center of US manufacturing in the 1860s? That's right, it was in the water-powered textile mills of MA.

From Corinth we drove west and crossed the mighty Mississippi

On the Arkansas side there were many farms with Byzantine patterns of dirt berms that we later learned are used for rice cultivation. Turns out Arkansas is the leading US rice-producing state by a large margin.

Arkansas Post National Memorial commemorates the oldest settlement on the west side in the Mississippi Valley. Starting in the 1686, the French, then the Spanish, then the French again, and then the US controlled this site, which was the first capital of Arkansas.

Now, well it's nothing more than a grid of sidewalks inviting you to imagine what a 18th century town might have looked like.

There were the obligatory fur pelts to evaluate and this time the fox may have been softer than Tai-Tai

Caroline and I jogged around the property and saw an armadillo waddle across the trail

Here in Arkansas surely 14 year-olds can drive and so Erin got to take a spin on the empty roads

Much of the water for all that rice-growing comes from the many oxbow lakes from the Arkansas and Mississippi Rivers.

We walked around the Governor Mike Huckabee Nature Center in Pine Bluff. We saw a bathouse and a bathhouse this day.

The site of the 1957 forced integration of Little Rock Central High School is still a functioning school

The Little Rock 9

Trader Joe's in Nashville and Little Rock equipped us for an eco-friendly picnic in Hot Springs. We used the same 3 hotel coffee cups for the entire trip.

Western Arkansas is in the Ouachita Mountains, which are the remnants of the range that formed 300 million years when Pangea formed. Wherever there were crust collisions there are hot springs, but there is only one National Park celebrating them.

The water bubbling up in Hot Springs fell on the earth's surface 4,500 years ago!

The NPS visitor center is in one of the grand bathhouses built in the early 1900s and this whole room would have filled with water for soaking. Who visited Hot Springs back then? Answer: Syphilitic white people. The bathhouses occupy one side of the main street and the other side was filled with dance halls and bars. The most common reason for seeking the "healing waters" was relief from gonorrhea and syphilis, in some cases likely picked up across the street.

Besides the STD sufferers, veterans came to sooth their wounds and there were early practitioners of physical therapy, who used pressurized jets like these 

There was a huge gymnasium on the 3rd floor

By far the fanciest JR swearing in area that we've seen

Caroline and I hiked up to the top of the mountain behind the springs. Apparently this is a chinquapin oak

Recognize that cute little boy? It's Billy Clinton, the man from Hope. Starting with Hoover and excepting Nixon/Ford & Bush, there is a pattern of 20th-century Presidents' homes becoming National Historic Sites. From the home in Hope one can see the train tracks that separated the white neighborhood from the Black neighborhood. Clinton's grandfather ran a store in the 40s and 50s that treated customers equally regardless of race, which was formative to young Billy.

We subjected the girls to the Monkees in Clarksville, TN. Later on in Tupelo, MS we spared them Van Morrison or Elvis

Another good place for driving lessons: abandoned malls like this one in Pine Bluff, AR

All of the hot springs are enclosed by the bathhouses except this one

I don't know what's worse, the state of the baths today or the thought of being back in the 20s sharing facilities with people shedding pathogens from STDs