LeFleur's Bluff: The Founding

The site had been a trading post first. Louis LeFleur, a French-Canadian trader, had established himself on the bluff above the Pearl River sometime in the early nineteenth century, running goods between the Natchez Trace and the Choctaw communities to the east. His bluff became a waypoint. The river provided access; the Trace provided traffic.

When Mississippi's legislature voted in November eighteen twenty-one to relocate the state capital from Natchez to a more central location, they commissioned three men to find a site. The commissioners traveled and reported. The site they chose was LeFleur's Bluff, which they described as offering beautiful and healthful surroundings, good water, abundant timber, navigable waters, and proximity to the Natchez Trace. The legislature authorized it as the permanent seat of state government on November twenty-eighth, eighteen twenty-one. They named the new capital Jackson, for General Andrew Jackson, hero of the Battle of New Orleans and, eight years later, the president who would sign the Indian Removal Act.

The Choctaw, who held this land at the moment of the founding, would be removed by formal treaty within nine years. The trading-post site on the Pearl River bluff became a capital city. The city that was built there grew on land whose prior owners had been legally dispossessed by the man whose name the city bears.

These are the kinds of historical ironies that cities carry without announcing them. They are worth announcing.