Fulton is a rural

unincorporated community An unincorporated area is a parcel of land that is not governed by a local general-purpose municipal corporation. (At p. 178.) They may be governed or serviced by an encompassing unit (such as a county) or another branch of the state (such as th ...

in Lauderdale County,

Tennessee Tennessee (, ), officially the State of Tennessee, is a landlocked U.S. state, state in the Southeastern United States, Southeastern region of the United States. It borders Kentucky to the north, Virginia to the northeast, North Carolina t ...

, United States. Founded in 1827, Fulton is the oldest settlement in Lauderdale County.

History

Fulton was founded in 1827 on of land owned by James Trimble. In the following two years, the population rose to 600. Around 1830, after a deadly fever struck the community and killed 200, the remainder of the population moved away; no inhabitants remained by 1832. It was re-surveyed and re-founded in 1835.

Economy

After the

abolition of slavery Abolitionism, or the abolitionist movement, is the political movement to end slavery and liberate enslaved individuals around the world. The first country to fully outlaw slavery was France in 1315, but it was later used in its colonies. T ...

sharecropping Sharecropping is a legal arrangement in which a landowner allows a tenant (sharecropper) to use the land in return for a share of the crops produced on that land. Sharecropping is not to be conflated with tenant farming, providing the tenant a ...

was the primary means of income for low income families in the area. Mostly for the cultivation of cotton, land would be used by sharecroppers in return for a share of the crop to the landowner. Modern machines such as the

cotton picker A cotton picker is either a machine that harvests cotton, or a person who picks ripe cotton fibre from the plants. The machine is also referred to as a cotton harvester. History In many societies, slave labor was utilized to pick the cotton, ...

have made the manual cultivation obsolete over time as they took over the work from manual laborers. As of 2008, there were no industries in Fulton.

Geography

Fulton is at coordinates . The settlement is located on the banks of the

Mississippi River The Mississippi River is the main stem, primary river of the largest drainage basin in the United States. It is the second-longest river in the United States, behind only the Missouri River, Missouri. From its traditional source of Lake Ita ...

, north of the mouth of the

Hatchie River The Hatchie River is a U.S. Geological Survey. National Hydrography Dataset high-resolution flowline dataThe National Map accessed June 3, 2011 river in northern Mississippi and southwestern Tennessee. It is of considerable geographic, culture, cu ...

. Fulton is situated on the southeastern edge of the New Madrid Seismic Zone, an area with a high

earthquake An earthquakealso called a quake, tremor, or tembloris the shaking of the Earth's surface resulting from a sudden release of energy in the lithosphere that creates seismic waves. Earthquakes can range in intensity, from those so weak they ...

risk. Tennessee State Route 87 and Tennessee State Route 207 both pass through Fulton.

References

Unincorporated communities in Lauderdale County, Tennessee Unincorporated communities in Tennessee {{LauderdaleCountyTN-geo-stub

History

Economy

Geography

See also

References