More Memphis Museums

Tim and I were in Memphis for just three days, one of which we spent with Ron, the new owner of our Prevost bus.  None of those days fell on a Tuesday when many of the city's museums offer free admission after 1:00 p.m., but we lucked upon the Cotton Exchange Museum.  This small museum is always free and even better, it was just around the corner from the downtown apartment we rented through Airbnb.

Walking into the Cotton Exchange Museum, we stepped back in time to when Memphis cotton traders stood on this very floor and made their bids on shipments of cotton.

By 1850 America was growing three-quarters of the world's cotton and much of it passed through Memphis.  To buy and sell on the Memphis Cotton Exchange, one had to become a member or work through a member.

The Exchange was a flurry of activity.  Every national brokerage firm had representatives on the floor; telephone operators updated the rapidly changing market; markers wrote changing prices on the board and Western Union runners hurried from the floor to offices up and down Front Street where cotton factors, merchants, and mill representatives did business.

Members of the Exchange were the upper crust of Memphis society.  The Memphis Cotton Carnival, organized in 1931, was a series of parties and festivities with a Royal Court of young debutantes.  Everything changed in the mid-1980s with the advent of the computer which made it possible to get prices and make trades electronically.  The character of the cotton business may have altered, but echos of the importance of cotton to the economy and culture of Memphis may still be heard here.

Turning to another huge influence upon Memphis, we visited the Mississippi River Museum at River Park on Mud Island.  Mud Island is actually not an island but a peninsula almost completely surrounded by the Mississippi River.

It's accessible by a quarter-mile walk over a covered bridge or by a quick ride on the monorail suspended beneath the bridge.  Of course, we chose to take a unique ride on the monorail and best of all, its ticket was included in the price of admission to the museum.

Once there we found a marvelous scale model of the Mississippi River in a flowing water feature that stretches five city blocks.  This miniature river is marked with the cities, bridges and historical markers to give visitors a unique perspective of the river.  My previous experiences with the Mississippi River were only quick crossings over interstate bridges and while the span of the Mississippi is impressive at Memphis or St. Louis, I had no idea how the river twists and turns back upon itself like a serpent.  Indeed, who knew of its horseshoe bend at New Madrid, Missouri!  Certainly not I, but then I'm getting ahead of myself.  More about New Madrid, Missouri will be forthcoming in a future post.

Having read Hernando DeSoto's name on so many historical markers while we wintered in Florida, I was surprised to learn that his 1539 expedition led him to the Mississippi River Valley.  He expected to find gold and treasures as great as those in the Inca and Aztec empires.  Instead, sick and disappointed, DeSoto died during the expedition and was buried somewhere on the banks of the river.

Unlike DeSoto, the next explorers came from the north determined to find a passage to the Pacific Ocean and claim the continent's interior for France.  Their names were Louis Joliet and Jesuit Father Jacques Marquette.  Upon reaching the mouth of the Arkansas River, the two realized that the Mississippi flowed into the Gulf of Mexico and wishing to avoid a confrontation with the Spanish, they returned north.

French explorer Sieur de LaSalle's expedition of 1682 was much more successful.  On April 9, 1682, after reaching the mouth of the Mississippi, LaSalle and his men erected a column affixed with the royal arms and claimed the entire Mississippi Valley for France.

Fast forward to the 1819 when Memphis was laid out by General Andrew Jackson, Judge John Overton and General James Winchester on a 5000-acre land tract which they owned and promoted for settlement.  Although population growth was slowed by recurring bouts with cholera, malaria, yellow fever and smallpox, the favorable location of the port to both the South and the West attracted large numbers of settlers.  By 1860, Memphis was a city of over 18,000.

A segment of the population that was not so settled were the river pilots and gamblers who brought entertainment and vice to the people living in the scattered and isolated river towns.  Prior to this visit, when I pictured Memphis, I always imagined a heroine twirling a parasol while promenading on the upper deck of a steamboat as it pulled into the city's dock.

Usually present in my imaginary plot was a swarthy river gambler, the villain of the story.   Appeasing my imagination, the museum gives more than just a tip of the hat to the Golden Age of the Steamboats that ran roughly ten years before the Civil War and for a few years after.

Perhaps no other river in the world has spawned as many music styles as the Mississippi River.  The sounds of spirituals, work songs, field hollars, Delta blues, ragtime, jazz, swing and soul music resound throughout the Mississippi Valley.  The Mississippi River Museum does justice to them all.

I titled this post "More Memphis Museums" and indeed there are more for us to visit the next time we come.  These two museums, plus the attractions I wrote about in the preceding two posts, were all we could cram into our three days here.  All the more reason to plan a return trip to Memphis at a future date!