(no audio) (gentle music) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) - Well, as always, William Faulkner had one of the very best lines about the South, in terms of churches, when he said, "It's just there."

That's why churches and religion were in all of his stories because his stories were set in the South, and churches and religion were everywhere in the South.

And you know, I think that's why, looking at church, using churches, which are so prevalent that they're basically, sort of, their existence is taken for granted, that means they are great windows on what's going on, because nobody is, you know, acting out of character or culture in anything that's done there.

So, when you sort of take that notion, and you apply it to the southwestern states that are just really starting to open up in the second decade of the 19th century, with the movement of, you know, the development of the cotton gin has spurred the rapid expansion of cotton growing and slavery.

And that has sent people who have been sort of in decline, families, big planning families, who've been in decline, are relocating part of their resources and some of their offspring to the far southwest, and particularly to the richer alluvial soils near the Mississippi River.

So that's what draws settlement there.

And of course, you know with settlement in the South there are going to be churches.

That's just a given.

And so what you're seeing there, and what you see with a place like Rodney, is just this warp speed development.

You know because it goes from being, you know just a tiny little prick on the map to being almost the capital of the Mississippi territory.

And then it becomes, you know one of the busiest ports on the Mississippi River.

And then, you know by the, shortly after the end of the Civil War, it's well on its way into decline.

So the church there has the potential to capture just a tremendously rich and very dramatic series of developments that mark the brief history of Rodney, Mississippi.

And the great thing when you have the visual of churches is that you can imagine a congregation in that church reacting to all those events, or playing a role in all of those events.

It's just one of those rare opportunities for historians to get to find a better, more illustrative way of really getting at, and representing what the history of that era and of that particular area has been.

And so, you know you get this kind, because these are literally rag-to-riches years for so many people who ventured into that part of the South, because they come with, you know, with whatever resources they can scrape together.

And, you know, their timing is just absolutely perfect.

And the locale is very well-suited to the production of a high grade of cotton.

The global backdrop here is the great industrial textile revolution in Europe, particularly in Great Britain.

♪ Mississippi River ♪ ♪ Take me down ♪ ♪ Deliver me to hallowed ground ♪ ♪ From the north Prairie ♪ ♪ To the delta down South ♪ ♪ Hear the dell whisper and the children shout ♪ ♪ Hear them call my name, call my name ♪ ♪ Hear them call my name, call my name ♪ ♪ Independent thinkers, whiskey drinkers ♪ ♪ All just links in the chain ♪ ♪ Mississippi River ♪ ♪ Whistling wind ♪ - [Jeff] Mississippi River is the fourth longest river in the world draining all or part of 40% of the land mass of the continental United States.

Its waters and ecosystem have sustained various civilizations for thousands of years.

There's always been the river, ever changing, giving life and sometimes taking it away.

♪ Call your name ♪ ♪ Hear them call your name ♪ ♪ Call your name ♪ ♪ Let's the annex finger ♪ ♪ True believer ♪ ♪ But another link into the chain ♪ - [Jeff] The town of Natchez, named for the Natchez tribe of Native Americans, was a southern terminus of the historic Natchez trace, linking the Cumberland, Tennessee and Mississippi Rivers.

The beautiful town of Natchez is well known, but before the rise of Natchez, there was Rodney, the most important river port between New Orleans and St. Louis.

Today, Rodney is a ghost town, and difficult to find.

But well worth the journey.

(gentle music) ♪ Well, I dearly love my home but ♪ ♪ It's never looked so good to me ♪ - [Jeff] The Mississippi countryside is beautiful.

♪ Two thousand dragon flies ♪ - [Jeff] They weren't kidding when they said Rodney was in the middle of nowhere.

(gentle music) ♪ Good things are going on ♪ ♪ Down in Mississippi ♪ - [Jeff] It's difficult to believe that Rodney was once the busiest port on the Mississippi between New Orleans and St. Louis.

In fact, when Mississippi was admitted to the union in 1817, Rodney was almost its first capital, losing to Jackson by three votes.

Today, Rodney sits two miles from the river.

♪ Let me feel good ♪ ♪ Down in Mississippi ♪ ♪ Folks smiling and saying hey ♪ ♪ In my ♪ - [Jeff] The prosperity of Rodney was such that it once had three elegant churches.

The oldest was Rodney Presbyterian, built in 1832.

It also had a Catholic church built in 1868 that has since been relocated.

♪ Founded on the Fourth of July ♪ - [Jeff] The third was Mount Zion Baptist Church, built in 1850.

♪ Good things are going on ♪ ♪ Down in Mississippi ♪ ♪ Good things are going on ♪ (birds chirping) - That church was originally a White congregation, but the number of of White people in Rodney declined so drastically that it became an African-American church and got the name Mount Zion, which it still has.

Greater Mount Zion was formed by some of the surviving members, and it's still an active church, but it's not here where it floods.

The Baptist church constantly flooding up to like eight feet of water inside.

And we would love for someone to restore it or put it in a place where it could be restored.

But it's very difficult to tell who owns it.

How can you put money into something that you can't acquire?

So it's there, it's a significant building, and we would love to see it be restored.

♪ I'm grind home, oh ♪ ♪ I'm blindfold ♪ ♪ I'm grind home, oh ♪ - Our organization has to focus on the Presbyterian church because we have title to this building.

We acquired title from the Daughters of the Confederacy, who got it from the historic Natchez Foundation, who got it from the Presbyterian Church.

And so this is the building we own, that we can restore.

And, sure, Rodney is a wonderfully interesting place but there's not much left of it.

And so you have to start somewhere.

If you want to save any of the town, you have to start with the buildings that you own.

♪ Look way down, babe ♪ ♪ Look way down low ♪ ♪ Look way down that low ♪ ♪ Well, I seen trouble ♪ ♪ I seen trouble down in ♪ ♪ I seen trouble, lord ♪ ♪ I seen trouble ♪ - [Jeff] Rodney Presbyterian is an architectural masterpiece.

Fortunately, efforts are underway to save it.

- Yeah.

Bob Adams, I'm the principal architect with Robert Parker Adams Architects PA in Jackson, Mississippi.

And we are the preservation architects for the Rodney Presbyterian Church.

I have become interested in historic architecture, preservation architecture, and have pursued a degree in a masters of Head Start Preservation as well as a doctorate based on historic preservation.

(birds chirping) Rodney Presbyterian Church is regularly inundated by floods from the Mississippi River.

What has happened is that those floods have undermined the building, softened the soil, and in softening the soil, the foundation itself has rotated.

The south wall of Rodney Presbyterian Church has moved outward and rotated such that it is trying to push the South wall outward and it's being retained at the top by the trusses of the roof.

So what has happened is as the footing rotates and the trusses pull inward, the wall itself is bowing and has bowed about five and a half inches.

That's almost sufficient to make the wall collapse.

If the wall collapses, it pulls down the opposite wall, all the roof trusses.

And we have lost the primary building in Rodney, Mississippi.

- Rodney burned in 1869.

It had burned previously in 1852.

We don't have any photographs, at least none have turned up that we know of, of what it looked like in that time period.

But in the newspaper accounts of the burning of Rodney in 1869, it is described as the beautiful town of Rodney.

When you're here and you're looking around, trying to figure out where was everything, the part of Rodney that burned in 1869, a lot of it wasn't really rebuilt.

From the church north was the original commercial district.

And you can see there's a river bank up there, that's no longer a river bank.

But that was where the Mississippi River was.

I mean, from the front of this church, you could easily see the Mississippi River.

It was just right there on the other side of Olive Street, lined with stores and with shops.

Broughton store was on the corner as you're coming down the hill into Rodney, on the right.

Alston store on the left.

It wasn't called Alston at the time.

Then on the other side, Berkeley Saloon, which was a big two-story brick building with chandelier's upstairs, where they used to have parties.

And then on the other side, the Beck and Till store and just a series.

There was a brick hotel boarding house in the middle, that was just dismantled last year.

So there were lots of buildings, even up into the '50s and '60s, that you could have seen if you were here.

("Amazing Grace" instrumental) ("Amazing Grace" continues) - [Jeff] The fate of Rodney is a sad one.

However, Natchez, only 40 miles away, is another story.

- From the very beginning, Natchez had a distinct advantage over Rodney, Mississippi.

Natchez was already the center of a great Native American culture, the Natchez Indians, before the French settled here in 1716.

It had one of the most desirable sites on the river.

If you can picture the French coming up and down the Mississippi and sort of eyeing where they might put a permanent settlement.

They would've fixed on Natchez.

The Natchez Indians had cleared a lot of the land.

They were initially hospitable.

Relatively hospitable to them.

And the viewpoint from a security standpoint would've been phenomenal, because Natchez is at its highest point, about 200 feet above the Mississippi River.

Rodney began to sort of grow as a little settlement from the territorial period and then grew more rapidly after statehood.

The town of Rodney was incorporated in the 1820s, 1828.

Rodney was important for Jefferson County, extremely important, because that was Jefferson County's only outlet to the river.

So all of the cotton grown could be taken in wagons or, you know, and taken a ship from there, which saved a lot of money and was convenient.

So Rodney began to prosper.

Natchez had its first version of the cotton gin in 1795, and then you take Steamboat on the river, and all of a sudden you've got an economy that's exploding.

And the reason that Natchez became, and the Natchez district became so extraordinarily wealthy from cotton, was the Industrial Revolution in Europe.

And the Industrial Revolution, which began in England.

Its major product was textiles and it swept all across Europe.

Fayette and Rodney and Churchill, our best-preserved plantation community in the entire state.

All of them were little centers, where people had a church.

Most of the plantations had commissaries.

The stores would come later, at the end of the Civil War for the most part.

And Rodney was a flourishing little town.

It had some disasters.

Yellow fever hit it in 1843.

Suffered tremendously from that particular epidemic.

And it's not just because the river moved, though that's the main thing that that killed Rodney.

♪ Big River ♪ ♪ Where do you flow ♪ ♪ Oh river, I'd like to know ♪ ♪ Some of the stories ♪ ♪ You never told me ♪ ♪ Mississippi ♪ - [Jeff] The Mississippi River brought much wealth to Natchez.

In 1850, half the millionaires in the United States lived atop the Natchez Bluffs.

In 1860, Natchez had more millionaires per capita than New York City.

Virtually all of this wealth was created by the rise of King Cotton and the plantation system, which required the enslavement of millions of African-Americans to make it work.

By 1860, four million slaves were engaged in this forced labor.

Because of that system, the country would soon be drawn into the tragic abyss of the Civil War.

♪ Floating castles upon your waters ♪ - [Jeff] On the eve of the war, cotton accounted for 60% of America's exports.

Much of the wealth of the entire United States was concentrated along the Mississippi River from Natchez to New Orleans.

Though much of the south was ravaged during the war, except for one brief shelling, Natchez came through it intact, leaving us an unparalleled architectural legacy.

Today, 600 Natchez homes are on the national register of historic places and there are more of these important buildings per square mile in Natchez than anywhere in the country.

Rodney was not so fortunate.

- There have been numerous attempts over the years to preserve Rodney and save the buildings there.

As early as the 1970s, a Rodney Foundation was established to preserve the buildings.

And that is also when the whole town of Rodney was listed as a district in the National Register.

And shortly after that time is when the Sacred Heart Catholic Church was moved to Green Gulf State Park, a few miles away, in order to save it.

And that was successful.

The church is beautifully restored at Green Gulf Park today.

The United Daughters of the Confederacy acquired the Rodney Presbyterian Church, after it stopped being an active church, in order to try to preserve it.

Several restorations have been completed on that building.

During one of those restorations is when the false cannon ball was placed on the front wall to signify the damage that was inflicted on it during the Civil War.

In recent years, a new group, the Rodney History and Preservation Society was formed to help bring attention to Rodney and save structures there.

And they were able to acquire title to the Presbyterian Church from the Daughters of the Confederacy.

And they are hopeful to complete a restoration on the building in the near future.

- One of the great challenges in restoration is establishing the period that you will use for restoration.

It is called the era of interpretation.

Is it the date when the building was built or was it some other significant time in the building's history?

Think about this in great depth because all buildings are not significant just because they were built a long time ago.

The age of a building has very little to do with significance.

My favorite example of that is Ford's Theater, where Lincoln was shot.

The theater itself is not spectacular in any manner.

Would've been torn down many years ago.

But the fact that Abraham Lincoln was killed there is what was significant about the building.

So that if you restore that building, you restore it to the day that Lincoln was shot, not the day the building was constructed.

This question has to be settled also with regard to the Rodney Presbyterian Church, We'll give a lot of discussion, a lot of information, and we will try to come to some conclusion about whether we take it back to 1832 or to some period after that, perhaps maybe even the Civil War.

- Ironically, the river, that was the reason that Rodney was founded, is also part of its demise today.

Four out of the last five years Rodney has had severe flooding from the Mississippi River, and by all indications, that is not gonna stop or get better anytime soon.

The Rodney Baptist Church is particularly susceptible to the flooding.

It has flooded numerous times up to the window sills.

It has been damaged severely by the flooding.

The pews floated out of the building during one of the floods and now they're laying rotting in the side yard.

The floors have been severely damaged.

(birds chirping) The flooding has not yet reached the Presbyterian church, but it's gotten up to the brick steps out front, so it's probably just a matter of time before it reaches that building as well.

- One of the most unusual stories of the Civil War occurred at the Rodney Presbyterian Church on September 13, 1863, when Captain E.H. Fentress, commanding officer of the Union gunboat USS Rattler, and 22 of his men were invited to attend services at the church.

Confederate Calvary, under the command of a Lieutenant Allen, caught word that the Yankees were at the church.

And under the cover of organ and choir music quickly surrounded the building.

An eyewitness account by Elijah Conklin, a teenager at the time, tells us that pandemonium ensued in the church on that fateful day.

According to Conklin, it was mayhem.

Women and children were screaming.

Men were diving out the windows.

Some were running out the front doors.

People were hiding under the pews.

Others climbing over the pews to get away.

Confederates outside were shooting, and calling on the sailors to surrender.

Several of the sailors escaped and made their way back to the Rattler.

At that point, the gunboat raised anchor and fired several salvos into the town, one of 'em striking the church.

15 of the USS Rattler crew had been captured, including Captain Fentress.

Eventually the Rattler departed for Natchez and the Federals were taken away.

The only time in civil war history that a federal gunboat crew was captured by Confederate Cavalry.

- So one of the really special things about Rodney Presbyterian is the acoustics inside the building.

The board is hoping that once the building is restored that we'll be able to use it for recitals and concerts and maybe choirs to come in from the different schools or churches in the area, because it really is a great place to listen to music.

And so just to give you a demonstration of that, I'll sing "Amazing Grace."

♪ Amazing grace how sweet the sound ♪ ♪ That saved a wretch like me ♪ ♪ I once was lost, but now I'm found ♪ ♪ Was blind but now I see ♪ - So that raises a lot of questions about what do you do with a place like Rodney with all these significant structures, but you know that it's just gonna continue to flood.

What do you do with a place where no one lives anymore?

It's not a center of commerce anymore.

It is an important place in our history, but it is a place that is very endangered today.

So that is something that we are grappling with and that a lot of interested people are grappling with.

Rodney takes hold on people's imagination and they really become interested and enthralled with it.

And a lot of people deeply care about it.

So that is the predicament today, is how do you save Rodney?

(gentle music) - [Jeff] The once thriving river port of Rodney, Mississippi, is almost gone.

Only the churches and the cemeteries remain.

But these historic rural churches are speaking to us, telling us how we got here, where we came from.

They tell us who we are.

♪ I see it on the grassy banks ♪ ♪ And made some chains of clover ♪ ♪ Ive traveled your muddy waters ♪ ♪ And my dreams, oh ♪ ♪ Mississippi ♪ (gentle music) ♪ Mississippi ♪