Bottomland on the big river

River and forest

Tywappity Bottom and the big trees

Mississippi County is the easternmost county in Missouri, a low, flat stretch of the Mississippi’s floodplain once called Tywappity Bottom, across the river from Illinois and Kentucky. Levee and drainage districts turned its swamps and bottomland forest into farmland, and soybeans and rice are major crops today.

A few pieces of the old landscape remain. Big Oak Tree State Park protects about 1,029 acres of untouched bottomland forest with state and national champion trees, and Ten Mile Pond is managed for the ducks, geese, and bald eagles that winter here.

Founding and early years

From the mounds to Charleston

Mississippi County was organized on February 14, 1845, and named for the Mississippi River, its eastern border. Charleston, laid out in 1837, became its seat.

The Civil War

Belmont, Charleston, and a bank robbery

The county’s riverbank faced the Confederate stronghold at Columbus, Kentucky. On August 19, 1861, Union and Confederate troops fought the Battle of Charleston. Two weeks later, on September 1, Confederate Gen. M. Jeff Thompson robbed the Union Bank of Charleston and left a receipt for $57,000, though only $56,000 turned up in the bags.

On November 7, 1861, Brig. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant landed about 3,100 men above Belmont, across from Columbus, and overran the Confederate camp. Reinforcements from Columbus counterattacked and Grant withdrew to his boats. Historians still argue over who won, but it was Grant’s first battle, and the troops he led there became the core of the Union Army of the Tennessee.

Since then

Saving the big trees, and opening the floodway

In 1938 the state set aside Big Oak Tree State Park to save some of the largest trees in the nation from the clearing all around it, and in 1967 it acquired the Towosahgy mound site. Charleston began its Dogwood-Azalea Festival in 1968.

The river still shapes the county. On the night of May 2, 2011, the Army Corps of Engineers blew open the Birds Point levee to take pressure off Cairo, Illinois, flooding about 130,000 acres of farmland in the Birds Point–New Madrid Floodway and about 90 homes.