Fort Adams, Mississippi

Fort Adams is a small, river port community in Wilkinson County, Mississippi, United States, about south of Natchez. It is notable for having been the U.S. port of entry on the Mississippi River, before the acquisition of New Orleans; it was the site of an early fort by that name.

The town was called Wilkinburg and was incorporated in 1798. Prior to that time, the community was known as Loftus Heights and formerly had been a Jesuit mission called the Rock of Davion, first settled as such around 1699.

This is also the site where the Choctaw Treaty of Fort Adams was signed in 1801.

History

In 1699, a French priest named Father Albert Davion established a mission on the Mississippi River bluffs at or near the site of Fort Adams.Noël Baillargeon, “DAVION, ALBERT,” in ''Dictionary of Canadian Biography'', vol. 2, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–, accessed April 24, 2025, https://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/davion_albert_2E.html Davion was a Catholic missionary previously stationed in Quebec who "came to bring the religion of Christ to the Tunica Indians. He erected & cross on Block House Hill, the highest peak of Loftus Heights, where he said mass every morning." The hill became a landmark and stopping place for people traveling on the river or on the overland trails that connected Natchez with New Orleans. Davion left the mission by 1722, but the site continued to be called ''Roche Davion'' (Davion's Rock) for many years thereafter. It acquired the name Loftus Heights in 1764, when a British expeditionary force led by Major Arthur Loftus was ended after being attacked by Indians at this site.

The site became Fort Adams after the United States and Spain settled a boundary dispute over parts of what is now southern Mississippi. The Treaty of San Lorenzo (Pinckney's Treaty), signed in 1795, established latitude 31 N as the boundary between Spanish West Florida and Mississippi Territory. U.S. General James Wilkinson selected Loftus Heights for a military post in 1798 on the advice of Captain Isaac Guion. The site, on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River about six miles upriver from the new international boundary, was judged to be a good position for observing and thwarting military movements on the river and was described by Wilkinson as the "most southerly tenable position within our limits." It was also close to the plantation of Wilkinson's business associate Daniel Clark Jr. and the planned town of Clarksville. The new fort was named for the sitting U.S. President, John Adams.Museum of Geoscience, Louisiana State University
Cultural Resources Survey of Fort Adams Reach Revetment, Mile 312.2 to 306.0-L, Mississippi River, Wilkinson County, Mississippi
. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers New Orleans District, COELMN/PD-91/04. August 1993. It was made of "brick and covered over in earth."

In December 1801, Fort Adams was the site of the negotiation and signing of a treaty between the Choctaw and the United States government. The Treaty of Fort Adams was the first in a series of treaties that ceded Choctaw land to the U.S. government and eventually led to the expulsion of the Choctaw Nation from lands east of the Mississippi River. In exchange for of land, the Choctaws received merchandise worth about $2,000 plus three sets of tools for blacksmithery. In 1803 General James Wilkinson had Colonel Thomas Butler arrested at Fort Adams on charges of being out of U.S. Army dress regulation because he maintained the old style queue (ponytail); Butler's court martial was held in Fredericktown, Maryland.

When Louisiana banned slave traders from out of state in 1832, Austin Woolfolk set up operations at Fort Adams, which was the first steamboat landing beyond the state line.

In the first half of the 19th century, before it was bypassed by both the river and the railroad, "this little place was of some commercial importance. It was quite a nourishing town and thousands of bales of cotton were loaded here, and an extensive business was carried on here; but its glory is now departed, and by reason of its inaccessibility is seldom visited by strangers, and it is but little known beyond the county in which it is situated...a quiet little village with houses of ancient architecture, whose crumbling walls and moss-covered roofs tell us that they were erected in generations that are passed and gone..." As of 1993, Fort Adams was a small community and the site of businesses that provided supplies to hunting and fishing camps in the region.

In literature

Fort Adams is the place where the protagonist of Edward Everett Hale's famous novel "The Man Without a Country", near death, asks a US military officer to see that a gravestone be placed in memory of him, since he's bound to be buried at sea.

See also

* U.S. annexation of the Republic of West Florida

References

External links

Fort Adams
at NorthAmericanForts.com

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Unincorporated communities in Mississippi
Unincorporated communities in Wilkinson County, Mississippi
Mississippi populated places on the Mississippi River
Forts in Mississippi
1699 establishments in New France