It is hard to imagine that the causes for near abandonment in this period had much to do with finding food, and economics were not the only reason for Native Americans to act.
It is likely that in the Middle Woodland period the kinds of rituals that took place where Native American groups came together put a high value on objects that were difficult to obtain. Perhaps that is why locations farther away from such easy routes for moving goods were favored.
Indeed, three of the largest Middle Woodland ritual sites in the southeast lie less than twenty miles from the main Tombigbee River Valley. Then, in the Late Woodland and Mississippian periods AD — , hunting with the bow and arrow became common, and after AD corn and beans from the North and West were introduced to the Tombigbee River Valley, giving a new importance to farming and floodplain wildlife.
But these populations were growing too large even for the productive bottomlands of the Tombigbee River Valley, and they certainly seem to have become so large and dense that traditional family rules and customs no longer regulated social comfort or provided cultural security. Such older customs must have been less and less useful as family groups increasingly relied on the same natural resources. Even cultivated plants only slowly gave more food for more labor.
By AD Native Americans occupying the broad and fertile floodplains of the Lower Tombigbee and Alabama River Valleys to the south and east, the middle Tennessee River Valley to the north, and the Lower Mississippi River Valley to the west reorganized their societies along theocratic and militaristic patterns reminiscent of those in central Mexico.
The Late Woodland peoples of the Black Prairie adopted this more hierarchical way of life that promised more and better crops as well as better protection from conflict with their neighbors and with each other. This new Mississippian way of life may have seemed blessed by the supernatural powers that ran the world. It must only have seemed right that it came with more exciting and gaudy rituals that tied together the rulers of the spiritual world and those who ruled the new society.
Only one major Mississippian site was excavated in the area along the Tombigbee River that would become the waterway, but one of the largest and most elaborate ritual towns of this new Mississippian society existed just a few miles to the east, in the Lower Black Warrior River Valley.
During this Mississippian period more use was made of the fish and mollusks and of the easily tilled, well-drained, and rich soils of the Black Prairie river bottoms, and socially distinct Mississippian groups lived in the central and southern portions of the waterway. These groups show differences in their pottery, their houses, and their site planning. In the north, villages were not only fortified but were located on river bluffs up tributary streams.
Since the earliest days of Alabama's territorial period , there had been a perceived need for a navigable link to connect the gap between the Tennessee River, which flows east to west through northern Alabama, and the Tombigbee River, which flows south through Alabama, eventually emptying into the Gulf of Mexico.
The Tennessee River swings west toward Mississippi and comes within miles of the Gulf of Mexico before turning north to travel several hundred miles to the Ohio River. Prior to the creation of the Tenn-Tom, commercial river traffic heading to the Gulf of Mexico had to travel hundreds of miles out of the way, despite its proximity to the Gulf. In , during the administration of Pres.
Ulysses S. Grant, the federal government conducted a study to determine the feasibility of constructing such a waterway. The study determined that although construction of a waterway was feasible, lack of sufficient commercial traffic made it impractical.
In , the federal government again studied the possibility of constructing a waterway consisting of 65 dams and lift locks, but the U.
Congress failed to appropriate funds for construction, and later studies failed to sway lawmakers. The project faced opposition from some members of Congress, which again denied funding. In , however, Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson approved funds to design and engineer the project, but the waterway continued to be controversial and was delayed by further legal challenges and funding shortages. A combination of environmental groups, the railroad industry, and members of Congress from other regions of the country were successful in blocking funding for years.
The lone company that regularly used the port, Mannington Mills Inc. Sumter hasn't been able to capitalize on the waterway or much anything else. Its population, now about 13,, has been in steady decline. One of Epes' few businesses closed this spring. Tons of wood products, steel, chemicals, crushed rock and grain ply the waterway each year.
Hundreds of boats and yachts pass through annually while traveling the "Great Loop" from the Great Lakes to the Florida Keys, a benefit not expected by early proponents. Around the same time, building a shorter route to the Gulf was first proposed shortly after the Louisiana Purchase in , and Congress authorized a study in Traffic on the Tennessee River had to swing hundreds of miles north to connect with the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, long the main water route from the central United States to the Gulf.
The idea was that connecting the Tennessee to the Tombigbee River would lure traffic from the Mississippi. The waterway eventually was approved in , but funding stalled when opponents challenged it as unrealistic, saying it had been engineered by powerful Southern legislators to bring federal dollars to an impoverished region.
Officials didn't break ground on the Tenn-Tom until after an environmental lawsuit was resolved. Thousands of workers built a series of 10 locks and a navigable, foot-wide meter-wide waterway with a minimum channel depth of 9 feet 2. More than four times as long as the Panama Canal, it was, at the time, the Army Corps of Engineers' largest infrastructure project ever. The Corps and supporters justified the spending with predictions that shippers would send 29 million tons 26 million metric tons up and down the Tenn-Tom annually, and the opening ceremony proclaimed it the pathway "to a dream of orderly growth and prosperity for all the people of this region, and for the nation as a whole.
However, Corps statistics show an average of only 7. By comparison, about million tons million metric tons of cargo went up or down the Mississippi River, which can accommodate much larger loads, over the same period. It just hasn't been what they thought it would," said Mitch Mays, administrator of the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway Development Authority. Alabama and Mississippi are making new efforts to promote the Tenn-Tom, he said.
Officials say there's no single reason companies didn't flock to the waterway. The rise of overseas industry hurt domestic businesses just as promoters were trying to sell the Tenn-Tom as a new route.
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