
I AM A MAN PLAZA / Logan Young
If you’ve seen the Mississippi River, you understand why people call it mighty. But might is more than a physical description. The pull of the river—at once vital and mystical—has called people to Memphis for a millennium.
Between 1000 and 1500 C.E., Mississippian cultures were building earthen mounds along the river. They had moved on by the time Hernando DeSoto arrived in 1541, claiming the land for Spain. The French and English made claims too, but by 1800, the land was part of a new order: the United States of America.
In 1819, a group of three entrepreneurs—including future U.S. President Andrew Jackson—seemed to feel the same pull looking out over the Mississippi River from this land. Memphis was founded on the river’s fourth bluff, and its first century was as dramatic as the land’s dips and climbs.
The land itself was ceded by native Chickasaw tribes, who were later displaced by Jackson’s Indian Removal Act. Where the tribes had sown corn—and with a nudge from European colonial powers, cotton—the new settlers doubled down on cotton. Throughout the Delta, including the bottomlands between the bluff and river’s edge in Memphis, the crop surged like a green wave, leaving a wake of snowy white at harvest time. Though Americans had just rebelled against a crown’s rule, cotton was coming up king, and Memphis was its royal seat.
By the mid-19th century, cotton merchants reigned Front Street and bale-laden barges commanded the river. Cotton fortunes financed mansions along Adams Avenue, nicknamed Millionaire’s Row. Beneath the surface, however, there was an undertow: Slave labor had enabled Memphis’ crest to the top of the world cotton market. Memphis was a slave port, and civil war was imminent. When the war reached Memphis, it took just 90 minutes for Union ships to overpower Confederate gunboats and raise the U.S. flag over the city.
One easy Union victory and Memphis was allowed to keep on growing. While the river was no longer running slaves, it was still running cotton—and the travel trade too. Steamboats, gambling boats, showboats—they all delivered people to Memphis before the turn of the 20th century.
But you’ve already caught the rhythm of this story: It’s up; it’s down. The river can give and the river can take. After the Civil War, the steamboat Sultana exploded and sank just below Memphis. Some 1,800 passengers—Union soldiers newly freed from Confederate prison camps—died. The site of the worst maritime disaster in U.S. history doubled as ground-zero for a public health crisis that nearly sunk the entire city. In the 1870s, a yellow fever epidemic forced tens of thousands of citizens to flee Memphis. Thousands who stayed perished, buried in mass graves at Elmwood Cemetery. The population—and its financial situation—were so frail, Memphis lost the charter it had gained just 50 years earlier.
Here’s the plot twist, the catalyst that smooths Memphis’ arc of tenuous highs and lows into something sustainable. It came from an unlikely source: Robert R. Church, Sr., born to a white steamboat captain and an enslaved seamstress, began operating a saloon in post-war Memphis. Though the war had ended, tensions hadn’t. A white mob attacked Church’s saloon, leaving him for dead. Church survived the attack, and the yellow fever epidemic too. At any point he could have—maybe should have—abandoned Memphis. Instead, he helped bail the city out of bankruptcy, preserving its charter. He invested in real estate, especially around Beale Street, and in Memphis’ African-American community. To the world, Church was the South’s first black millionaire. To Memphis, he was a reason for being, the architect who built vision, grit and generosity into the city’s foundation.