Fulton and the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway

Fulton is the seat of Itawamba County, established in eighteen thirty-seven on land ceded by the Chickasaw in the Treaty of Pontotoc. But the defining event in Fulton's modern history came more than a century later. The Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway, one of the most ambitious civil engineering projects in American history, passes through here.

Completed in nineteen eighty-four after about twelve years of construction, the waterway links the Tennessee River in northeast Mississippi to the Tombigbee River in Alabama through two hundred thirty-four miles of locks, canals, and channelized river. It was built to give Appalachian coal and Midwestern grain a shorter route to the Gulf of Mexico than the Mississippi River. The Fulton Lock sits right outside town.

The project cost two billion dollars and remains one of the largest federal water projects ever completed.