“One can drive a hundred miles from north to south through the middle of the Missouri Delta and see hardly more than a wood lot. It was all or nearly all heavily timbered swamp land only forty years ago.” –Thad Snow, From Missouri, 1954
The Mississippi Lowlands area in far southeastern Missouri is mostly a flat alluvial plain shaped by outwash from the great glaciers. About thirty to fifty million years ago, this region was part of the Mississippi Embayment, similar to today’s delta, emptying to the Gulf of Mexico. The region is now the northernmost reach of the Gulf Coastal Plain and harbors many species characteristic of that region. Clearly set off from the Ozarks and the Ozark Border to the west and north by an escarpment 100 to 250 feet high, this is the most physiographically, biologically, and culturally distinctive region of Missouri.
The natural vegetation that occupied this low-lying region less than two centuries ago was unlike any found elsewhere in the state. Imagine a vast, deep forest of massive oaks, ancient bald cypress swamps, and impenetrable thickets of giant cane stretching five hundred miles southward to the Gulf Coast. The massive glacial outwash that shaped this landscape during more than a million years carried in its waters silts ground fine in thousands of miles of braided channels, then carried aloft by strong winds to create sand dunes and ridges. Even after the glaciers retreated, floodwaters from the Mississippi and from rivers draining the southeastern Ozarks continued to nourish the landscape. Though interrupted by north-south-trending sandy ridges, some elevated only a few feet above the surrounding terrain—except one, Crowley’s Ridge, which stands some 100 to 150 feet high—most of the land was low, bathed annually in nutrient-rich floodwaters. The resulting bald cypress and tupelo gum swamps and tall bottomland forests dominated by elm, sweetgum, oak, and other hardwoods were lush and diverse, containing many species at the northern or western limits of their range. The wildlife was abundant and diverse.
The region is distinctive also in having been the most thoroughly altered by human beings through deforestation, ditching, and draining, with most of the alteration occurring in the twentieth century. Because it has undergone such rapid transformation so recently, the area has had a demographic and social history unlike that of any other region of the state. And because it is different and also remote from most of the state’s population, the region is probably the least known and understood by most Missourians.
The Mississippi Lowlands have two distinct land types: the lowlands themselves, poorly drained and of slight relief, and Crowley’s Ridge, an elongated line of steep uplands that arc across the region from the Mississippi south of Cape Girardeau southwest to the lower St. Francis River. Three units of the state park system are in the lowlands and one is on Crowley’s Ridge.
The first is Big Oak Tree State Park in Mississippi County, one of the few spots anywhere in the lowlands where one can experience the magnificent bottomland forest and bald cypress swamp that covered virtually the entire area before the headlong deforestation that began in the late nineteenth century. Not far from Big Oak Tree is Towosahgy State Historic Site, located on a natural sand ridge along an oxbow of the Mississippi, where archaeological excavations have documented a fortified ceremonial center of the town-dwelling peoples of the Mississippian tradition, who occupied this area and much of the southeastern part of the country between about AD 1000 and 1400.
The Hunter-Dawson home in New Madrid, built in the late 1850s and occupied by the interrelated Hunter and Dawson families until the 1960s, evokes the character of the region in the antebellum period and reflects the lives and activities of entrepreneurial families that were deeply involved in virtually all aspects of the stunning transformation of the Mississippi Lowlands from “swampeast” Missouri to the richest agricultural region in the state.
For years, the state sought a park on Crowley’s Ridge, a series of hills that once bordered an earlier channel of the Mississippi on its west side. Today, a small but fascinating tract near Malden, Morris State Park, provides some representation of this feature. The park and the much longer ridge of which it is a part are of great interest both geologically and biologically, and because the ridge stood above the swampy lowlands, it was one of the earliest corridors for human movement and agricultural settlement.
Missouri’s Mississippi Lowlands make a compelling landscape, linking our upper South border state to the deeper delta South. Despite drastic alterations of the region’s natural features, the state park system preserves superb highlights of original forest and ridge scenery, prehistory, and historic architecture worthy of every Missourian’s time and exploration.
Feature Photo: The swamp forests that were formerly characteristic of the Mississippi Lowlands have been reduced to tiny remnants, like this one at Big Oak Tree State Park, where yellow butterweed still thrives in saturated soils. • Ken McCarty
To read more, purchase the Missouri State Parks and Historic Sites book here
