MUD ISLAND

Today I went to Mud Island.  It is an island on the Mississippi River in downtown Memphis.

There was a riverboat museum and within the museum was a section on the civil war, a section on music, and a section on disasters on the Mississippi River.

Desoto explored down the Mississippi River searching for gold.  Instead, he found Indians and lots of them. Other explorers came after and eventually river settlements/towns starting developing along the river.

As you can see from the picture above, some of the towns started along the river were started under questionable terms.  With all these settlements and people needing to get supplies from one place to another, boats became important for the river.  However, uprooted trees would float in the river and would ram into the hull of the boats and sink them.  Capt. Shreve (who Shreveport was named after) developed the Snag Boat which would move over these trees and push them to the back of the boat where the tree would be chopped up into small harmless pieces.

 

Steam riverboats became more and more common.  Entertainment took place on the boats as well as poker games.  Of course, when epidemics of things like cholera and yellow fever broke out, they were quickly spread by people travelling on the riverboats.

So the next part to the museum was entering a mock Packet Boat:

This is what a cabin would have looked like:

 

The bar area:

Where the Captain stood to steer the boat:

 What the pier would have looked like with the kind of cargo that would have been loaded on the boats. I think Mr. W is sitting on a keg of gun powder. :)

 The stairway that would lead down to the deck of the boat.

 

Can you see the winding river in the concrete in the pic below?  This was one of the coolest things.  From the start of the Mississippi River til it ends in the Gulf of Mexico is carved out in a smaller scale down this very long riverwalk.  The amount of water that is in the river is equivalent to the amount of water in the Mississippi River on that particular day.  As you walk down the river, there are information markers that identify towns, lakes, islands, spillways, state lines, basically everything along the river. Where there are major cities/towns on the river, there is a map of the city on the concrete with identifying landmarks for each city. (i.e. airports, parks, bridges, hospitals, universities, etc.) It showed where the Ohio River and Columbia River flowed into the Mississippi. There was tons of detail in this and did I mention it is really cool????



 

I am probably not explaining this whole display in a way to give it justice.  Trust me, if you ever have the chance to see this, take the time to see it.

 

You get to Mud Island by monorail that goes over a part of the river.  Have you seen the movie The Firm?  I'm not sure if you remember, but Tom Cruise rode this monorail over to Mud Island.  I don't remember why he did it, but he did.  We were talking about this as we stood in line and the ticket taker informed us that the car we were getting ready to board was the exact same car that Tom Cruise rode in when the movie was filmed. If I actually liked Tom Cruise, I might have thought this was a really cool thing.

The monorail traveling to Mud Island.

Looking out the front of the monorail car as I travel back to downtown Memphis.  Speaking of.......

Looking at downtown Memphis from Mud Island

 

Remember that I mentioned that BIL was a pilot for Fed Ex?  Well, as we looked at one of the bridges crossing the Mississippi, BIL informed me that they use to use the bridge, when it was lit up at night, as a landmark to help them get to the airport for landing.  They called it the Dolly Parton bridge.  I wonder why?  :)

See this picture below:

This is a replica of one of the boats used when trade started down the Mississippi.  This wooden boat had no motor so they could only float downstream.  The merchants would build the boat, load their wares on the boat, come downstream, sell their wares and since they couldn't take the boat back, they would sell the wooden boat to people who wanted to build a house.  They would then start walking back  to start the process all over again.  The path they would walk soon became known as the Natchez Trace. A little bit of trivia.

 





I enjoyed my outing to Mud Island and I highly recommend you visit here if you are ever in the area.  The cost is $10 pp.; $9 pp for seniors.  Children are $5.  I read a lot of history today and too bad I can't remember it all! But, I love history so it was well worth my time.

Mr. W and I standing on the mock boat deck.