Cairo's better side

Last week on Marathon Pundit I blogged about the sad town of Cairo, Illinois--and what I wrote for certain will never be linked to by the town's chamber of commerce web site.

But Cairo is not just a rotten borough--although I believe it could end up beconing a ghost town.

Cairo is situated just north of the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. Because of its strategic location, it served as an important supply station for Union forces during the Civil War. The peninsula town's population peaked at 15,000 in 1920, it has been declining since then--just 3,600 people call Cairo home now.

Much of Cairo is literally crumbling. Things are a little better on the west side of town, and in this post I'll focus on the better parts of Cairo.

Magnolia Manor, pictured on the upper-left, counts Ulyssess S. Grant as among its overnight guests. the Italianate-style home was built in 1872, and in 1880, the owner of the house held a celebration in Grant's honor. In 1999, a Magnolia Manor tour guide told the Chicago Tribune's Alan Solomon, "A lot of places say 'Grant slept here,' we've got the actual bed."

On the upper left is a mansion built in 1865, The Riverlore, built in 1865. The Second Empire style home has had only four owners, the latest of which is the City of Cairo. Like Magnolia Manor, The Riverlore is open to the public.

In Barack Obama's Audacity of Hope,he wrote about a barbecue held in his honor by the Laborers' Union Ed Smith. Obama doesn't identify the location in his book, but I can't see any other place in town that could have handled the crowd other than St. Mary's Park. Last year I blogged about Obama's trip to Cairo, which you can read about here.

The red brick building on the right is the A.B Safford Public Libary.

On the left is the Cairo Customs House. It was constructed in 1872, and like Magnolia Manor, it is listed by the National Register of Historic Places. It's now a musuem. It's architecht was Alfred B. Mullet, who also designed the Old Executive Office Building in Washington, (now known as the Eisenhower Executive Office Building), and St. Louis' Old Post Office.

Obviously Cairo is a town of contrasts. There are the jewels pictured here, but there is also the rubble of Commercial Avenue.

Next: My pentulimate post in Marathon Pundit's My Mississippi Manifest Destiny series, Jonesboro, site of a Lincoln-Douglas debate.

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Fort Defiance: Confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers

My Mississippi Manifest Destiny has taken me home. Almost. I'm in Illinois, but closer to Tupelo, Mississippi than Chicago. After leaving Johnny Cash's boyhood home in Arkansas, I drove north through Missouri's "Bootheel," crossing the Mississippi into Illinois to the site of the former Fort Defiance.

See that marker up there? It's the precise spot where two of America's greatest rivers--the Mississippi and Ohio--meet.

When the Civil War began, both sides realized the importance of the Mississippi River. As I wrote in the Vicksburg part of this series, when the North captured that strategic town on July 4, 1863, and the smaller Port Hudson a few days later, the Confederacy was split in two.

As for the Federals, they knew if the South occupied the confluence of the two great waterways, the flow of Northern commerce--as well as troops and supplies--would be stopped right there.

Which is why Fort Defiance was built on the peninsula. It's the post where newly promoted Brigadier General Ulysses S. Grant of Galena took up his first command in the fall of 1861.

Any evidence the fort itself has long been swept away or submerged by the dozens of floods that have overwhelmed the site since Grant moved south. Fort Defiance once was a state park, but the state abandoned it, and the nearby town of Cairo owns it.

But when I was there in late May it was closed. And it looks like it's permanently closed, although I was among a dozen people who parked in front of the barricaded entrance, stooped below the gate, and walked a mile or so on an asphalt driveway, which was covered with dried mud, to where the rivers meet.

On the left is the Ohio River, on the right is the Mississippi. You may notice the blue-ish Ohio water, the Mississippi water is muddier. Maybe it was the wind that day, but the Mississippi looked more menacing than its counterpart to the east.

Both bridges belong to the concurrent US Routes 60 and 62. Here's some trivia for you: Only two states in the union border each other that are not connected by a road--those states are Missouri and Kentucky. This highway comes very close to connecting them, but motorists have to cut through the southern tip of Illinois to get there.

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