Grand Gulf

Grand Gulf is named for the whirlpool where the Mississippi runs hard against a rocky bluff, a hazard boatmen wrote about long before a town stood here. Incorporated in 1833, it shipped 47,770 bales of cotton in the nine months from September 1834 to May 1835, hauling the crops of Claiborne, Copiah and Hinds counties. About a thousand people lived here by 1854. Yellow fever kept returning, the river drifted west and left the town landlocked, and by 1900 only 150 remained. James Monroe Trotter, born enslaved here in 1842 and freed by his father, grew up in Cincinnati.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Windsor Ruins — 7.8 mi
  Twenty-three standing Corinthian columns left by an 1890 fire, the largest antebellum mansion in Mississippi, built with enslaved labor on a 2,600-acre cotton plantation.
• Lake Bruin State Park — 10.0 mi
  A state park on a Mississippi River oxbow near St. Joseph, named for a territorial judge who owned a plantation beside it, on a former fish hatchery site.
• Alcorn State University and Oakland Memorial Chapel — 12 mi
  The 1871 Reconstruction college on the old Oakland College campus, first led by Hiram Revels, with the 1838 chapel built by Black craftsmen.
• Old Court House Museum — 24 mi
  Vicksburg's Greek Revival courthouse of 1860, raised on a hilltop with the labor of enslaved artisans and now a private local-history museum heavy on Confederate relics.

More markers nearby

• On to Vicksburg — steps away
• Site of the Hermitage — 5.9 mi
• Claiborne County — 6.4 mi
• First Baptist M.B. Church — 6.5 mi