New Orleans Daily Delta
- 1855
“Port Gibson: Its Unparalleled Site--Its
Bridges--Churches--Its Arcadian Shrubbery--and Noble-Hearted Citizens”
Vidalia, La., Feb., 1855.
Messrs. Editors of the Delta:
Gentlemen: Having seen Port Gibson, the county town of old Claiborne, in
Mississippi, some three weeks since, my impressions of the beauty and extreme
loveliness of that favored spot are still so vivid that I am constrained, like
a painter who has a likeness engraved upon the retina of his eye, to paint it
in a visible form, and thus disburden myself of a vision that has clung to me
like a charm.
Landing at the waning and dilapidated town of Grand Gulf,
which is but the piraeus or landing place of the real city, I was whirled, in
some ten minutes' time, over a fast and substantial railroad, some eighteen
miles, right into the centre of a beautiful city, of which I had no previous
conception. The wide, regular streets, cutting each other at right angles,
lined with elegant mansions embowered in a perfect sea of evergreen shrubbery,
showed me an Arcadian vision of spring in bloom even while winter was reigning
monarch of all the rest of the world. The site is most unique and romantic.
An amphitheatre of hills is thrown around a warm, sunny,
circular valley, like a curtain, or a series of carved bastions. At the foot
of the circular sweep of those ramparts of hills, the Bayou Pierre flows round,
encircling a large part of the city like a curved arm, and another bayou,
probably dry a part of the year, completes the circle. From the inner banks of
these bayous the site of the city swells up, cone-like and oval, like a
flattened hemisphere, with a regularity, beauty and grandeur even that almost
defies description.
Every street and square of the city, as well as the proud
sweep of the circumambient hills, are drained by these bayous, forming natural
outlets for inundating showers and gratuitous sewerage for the handsome and
tidy city. As on the apex of the flattened dome which constitutes the site of
the city, the court-house is seen like a crown of beauty, flanked on Church
Street with four sacred edifices whose eloquent spires, pointing heavenward,
would seem to indicate to the time-worn and weary even a better world than the
earthly paradise around.
From the highest point or centre of the city, a view is
gained, away down the main avenues, of the arches of three splendid bridges,
spanning the crystal waters of the now clear and limpid Bayou Pierre. One of
these bridges is on the road leading to the capital of the State; another on
the high road to Grand Gulf; and the third, the longest self-sustaining wooden
arch in the world, is the Port Gibson and Grand Gulf railroad bridge. It is
the splendid creation of those eminent bridge architects of Natchez, the
Brothers Weldon, who have done so much in the public Parish works of upper and
middle Louisiana. Aided by their consummate knowledge of science, these
architects are capable of any conceivable achievement.
The private city residences which shelter a refined,
educated and noble-minded population of some eleven or twelve hundred, seem to
vie with each other in architectural beauty and evergreen shrubbery; while on
every summit of the proud surrounding circle of hills are seen beautiful
villas, and in a spot, sacred to memory and immortality, rise the white and
solemn monuments of "the city of the silent." The whole panorama
combines beauty, peace and grandeur.
I found the citizens, all of them, distinguished by that
noble but refined air of independence, so peculiarly Mississippian, which, in Europe,
would be called lordly and aristocratic. It has an excellent principal hotel
in the Bobo House. It is full of academies and schools of education, and
boasts of two eminent weekly journals, "The Correspondent," and
"The Reveille."
My stay was far too brief, and I left the enchanting spot
with a plaintive sigh of Moore's Vale of Avoca on my lips, which ran thus:
Good Vale of Port Gibson! how calm could I rest
In thy bosom of shade, with the friends I love best,
Where the storms that we feel in this cold world would
cease,
And our hearts, like thy waters, be mingled in peace.
submitted by Sue B. Moore
sbmoore@swbell.net
