Pigeon Roost: Two Billion Birds and a Trading Post

In eighteen ten, the ornithologist Alexander Wilson, traveling in Kentucky, encountered a flock of passenger pigeons so vast he estimated it at over two billion birds. The column was two hundred forty miles long. Flocks like that once passed through this part of Mississippi too, and the settlement took its name from the roosts.

Nathaniel Folsom, a New Englander, had already, by around seventeen ninety, opened Folsom's Stand and Trading Post deep inside Choctaw territory. He married a Choctaw woman and put down roots. Their son David Folsom was elected chief of the northeast district of the Choctaw Nation in eighteen twenty-six. By eighteen twenty-one the location was a named stop on the Nashville-to-Natchez mail route. The passenger pigeon is now extinct. The stand is long gone. But the name on the map keeps both stories alive.