| This site is one of three possible locations where the expedition of Hernando DeSoto may have crossed the Tombigbee River in the fall of 1540. The area was described by English surveyor Bernard Romans in December 1771. The community was the location of a cotton gin and cotton-shipping point established by the U.S. Government in order to promote cotton cultivation among the Chickasaws. The settlement was the terminus of the Gaines Trace, surveyed in 1807, and it became a major steamboat shipping point on the upper Tombigbee. It was incorporated as a town in 1838, but declined as Amory grew up to the east around the newly built railroad. The site was listed on the National Register on 18 October 1972, from a nomination prepared in 1971 by Elbert Hilliard, who was at that time the director of the Division of Historic Sites and Archaeology of MDAH. |