By 1830, cotton planters from Natchez and from Kentucky and the Carolinas had discovered the high ground and cooling breezes around Lake Washington, an ancient oxbow lake seven miles long and a mile across created when the Mississippi River shifted course. In the 1850s planters began building grand houses, sometimes bringing craftsmen downriver from Kentucky and southern Indiana to erect and finish them. The lake created a “town center” where the planter families enjoyed a social life while overseeing their plantations, from which small communities such as Erwin, Foote, Glen Allen, and Chatham took their names. The dry high ground on the eastern shore provided a base for rescue efforts during the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927.
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