The Fort St. Pierre preserve in Redwood, Mississippi, recently benefited from the hard work and skills of AmeriCorps Southern Region. AmeriCorps is a national service program in which volunteers work with nonprofit organizations all over the country to help fulfill service needs. The site of Fort St. Pierre was donated to The Archaeological Conservancy in 2019, and approximately half of the site is covered in trees. Volunteers with expertise in chainsaw work from the AmeriCorps campus in Vicksburg, Mississippi, spent a day at the site carefully cutting and removing trees to prepare it for future geophysical surveys.
Fort St. Pierre is a former French-fortified outpost located on a high bluff above the Yazoo River near its confluence with the Mississippi River. The fort was established in 1719 by French colonists as the northernmost outpost of French Louisiana. It served, in part, to protect their interests and stake in the land and as part of a financial enterprise cooked up by a man named John Law. The riches of the Louisiana colony were heavily exaggerated to attract French and German people to abandon their homes overseas and resettle at the fort. The ultimate goal was to secure more land for France and thwart increasing British influence among local tribes. Originally intended to house 100 French marines and approximately 200 settlers, it was located far from other major French forts and poorly supplied. In 1729, approximately only 25 French citizens remained when neighboring tribes, the Koroa and the Yazoo, attacked and burned the fort, killing all but nine women and children, who were taken captive and later rescued by the Choctaw and Chakchiuma tribes. The French never returned.
The geophysical surveys will help the Conservancy map the site and determine how much of the fort has been lost to erosion. That information will aid in the development of a plan to deal with erosion in a way that protects the archaeological deposits. The expert tree removal by AmeriCorps volunteers has paved the way for this process to begin.
