Fort Adams / Fort Pike

The first American post on this bluff rose from a Spanish one. Spain raised its flag at Fort San Fernando de las Barrancas on May 30, 1795, after the Chickasaw leader Ugulayacabe ceded the land. Five months later the Treaty of San Lorenzo gave the United States the lands east of the Mississippi above the 31st parallel, and no Native leaders had been invited to negotiate. In December 1796 Ugulayacabe and about 150 followers confronted the Spanish commandant. Early in 1797 the Spanish demolished the fort, and Americans rebuilt it as Fort Adams.

What the plaque says

Fort Adams / Fort Pike With Chickasaw approval, Army Captain Isaac Guion erected the United States' first garrison in the mid-Mississippi Valley here in October of 1797. Initially named Fort Adams for the second U.S. President, the stockade was later called Fort Pike, because Adams' name was transferred to a larger fort at Natchez, Mississippi. Fort Pike was vacated in 1798, when Fort Pickering was constructed on a higher part of the bluff.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Beale Street — 1.2 mi
  The street that became the center of Black Memphis after the Civil War, home to Church's Park, W. C. Handy, Ida B. Wells and the blues, now a National Historic Landmark district.
• Sun Studio — 1.4 mi
  The small Union Avenue room where Sam Phillips recorded Rocket 88, Howlin' Wolf, Elvis Presley and the Million Dollar Quartet, now a National Historic Landmark.
• National Civil Rights Museum — 1.6 mi
  The Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King Jr. was killed on April 4, 1968, kept as a museum of the civil rights movement from the nineteenth century to today.
• 1866 Memphis Massacre Marker at Army Park — 1.7 mi
  A privately funded NAACP marker in a small downtown park, placed in 2016, that names the May 1866 attack on Black South Memphis as a massacre.

More markers nearby

• Navy Yard — steps away
• The Pinch — 0.2 mi
• Casey Jones — 0.5 mi
• Josiah T. Settle 1850-1915 — 0.5 mi