Karen and I began our Independence Day weekend traveling to the Delta and visiting a place that time surely has forgotten. We met up with Maryanne Weissinger Smith, a friend of many years, and ventured into the Sky Lake Wildlife Management Area. There we experienced a Mississippi swamp with the feel and look of 500 years ago. It is one of the largest surviving stands of “old growth” cypress trees anywhere. I have written several times about how Mississippi’s landscape must have looked when it was first encountered by Europeans. Now I know.
The day started off visiting in Belzoni with Mrs. Ollie Mohamed, widow of the late long-time State Senator Ollie Mohamed. She is a most gracious lady and full of the most interesting family stories. Being in Belzoni we dined at lunch on catfish and sweet potatoes. A rain shower threatened and so before heading to Sky Lake, Mrs. Mohamed and Ollie Mohamed, Jr. took us to the Catfish Museum and the Jaketown (archaeology) Museum. The rain ended and we parted company with our new friends and headed seven miles north to Sky Lake.
To say that Sky Lake presents a primordial visage is an understatement. The effect was set just driving there. Though only a few miles north of Belzoni, once we turned off Highway 7 the countryside took on the appearance of a different time. It was after I lost GPS service and I thought we must be lost that I realized we were almost there.
The state has built a parking area with rest facilities and picnic tables at the entrance to a boardwalk into the swamp and there also is a canoe trail. You don’t go far though until you are in another world. According to Wildlife Mississippi, an organization that played a key role in helping the Mississippi Department of Wildlife Fisheries and Parks preserve Sky Lake. “The ancient bold cypress trees of Sky Lake are one of the largest remaining tracts of old-growth cypress on earth.”
Reading early description of Alabama and Mississippi, the swamps along the river systems made a deep impression on the early settlers. It was in 1838 that Philip Henry Gosse arrived in Alabama and became a school teacher near Selma. On one occasion he went hunting in a local swamp and described his impressions.
“We skirted the edge of a cypress swamp, a tract invested with a gloom far more savage and sombre than any through which we had passed. Nothing can be more dismal than the interior of one of these swamps, even by day, half-tepid stagnant water covering the ground, the density of the timber and the black opacity of the foliage almost shutting out the light, while the gaunt horizontal branches are hung with far-pendent ragged masses of that Spanish moss that I have before alluded to, the very type of dreariness and desolation. Such trees always remind me of an army of skeletons, giants of some remote age, still standing where they had lived, and still wearing the decaying tatters of the robes which they had worn of old.”
While such scenes were one to be diapered of, the description now hints of a rare natural beauty. That is Sky Lake. Dark dingy water, foliage almost blocking sun light in places, rotting logs in the muddy water. It does not sound appealing but in its primordial setting it is. A pause in walking along the 1,735-foot-long elevated boardwalk through the ancient river run reveals wildlife flourishing amidst 1,000-year-old trees and creates a surreal setting.
But it is the trees that take your breath away. A forest of cypress trees, many 800 to 1,000 years old. The largest cypress along the Tombigbee at Columbus look like mere children compared to the giants of Sky Lake. One huge tree measures almost 47 feet in circumference and 15 feet in diameter. They are trees like the trees that de Soto encountered some 477 years ago as he crossed present day Mississippi. Several of the Sky Lake cypress may even be 1,500 to 2,000 years old.
Sky lake is only about a 2-and-a-half hour drive from Columbus, but it takes you back 500 years in time.
Rufus Ward is a Columbus native a local historian. E-mail your questions about local history to Rufus at [email protected].
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