Rodney

Once a thriving river town, Rodney now has a ghostly presence that remains the most iconic of Eudora Welty’s “little chain of lost towns between Vicksburg and Natchez” as described in her Some Notes on River Country (1944). The hamlet clings to the edge of the bluffs in an area once known as Petit Gulf, for a dangerous curve and eddy in the river. The 1860 census for Rodney documents a surprisingly high percentage of builders and artisans—including one of antebellum Mississippi’s most able contracting firms, Weldon Brothers, who had a sawmill here. But after the capricious Mississippi River changed course in 1870 and then the railroad bypassed the town in 1886 for Fayette, the bustle went away. When Welty photographed “Rodney’s Landing” in the 1930s, a line of frame commercial buildings and several nineteenth-century houses remained, along with about a hundred residents. But today only a few buildings still stand, and hunters and their camps are the two-block town’s primary occupants. Visitors arrive on the gravel Rodney Road from either MS 552 or Alcorn State University and enter the town at the one-story, front-gabled Alston’s Store (c. 1840) on Commerce Street (Muddy Bayou Road) at Rodney Road. Chamfered wooden posts support the wraparound shed porch of this rare antebellum clapboard and board-and-batten rural store.