Levees, cotton, and the river

River and land

Liquid mud and old mounds

Pemiscot County is the southeastern corner of the Bootheel, with the Mississippi River as its eastern border and Tennessee across the water. It is the only Missouri county entirely within the Sun Belt. The flat, rich land was swamp and bottomland before levees and drainage turned it into cotton country.

People lived here long before. The Murphy Mound site southwest of Caruthersville holds one of the largest platform mounds in Missouri, a Late Mississippian earthwork from about 1200 to 1541. It is on private land and not open to visitors.

Founding and early years

From Gayoso to Caruthersville

Pemiscot County was organized on February 19, 1851, and named for a local bayou; the name is Fox for “liquid mud”. Its first seat, Gayoso, was lost to the river; Caruthersville has been the seat since 1899.

The river

Levees, drainage, and a lost town

The Mississippi gave the county its living and kept taking its land. In 1893 the General Assembly created the Saint Francis Levee District to build and maintain levees in Dunklin, New Madrid, and Pemiscot counties, and the Little River Drainage District later turned bogs into cotton fields.

The river was harder on Gayoso, the first county seat. As its banks caved in, the county voted to move the seat, and in 1899 the records went to Caruthersville, a town laid out in 1857 and named for former Congressman Samuel Caruthers. Its lighthouse-shaped water tower went up in 1902–03.

Since then

The fair, the bridge, and the storm

In the 1930s and 1940s President Harry S. Truman came each year to Caruthersville’s American Legion Fair, whose fairgrounds were also home to the Caruthersville Pilots baseball team. The county’s population peaked at 46,857 in 1940; as farm work was mechanized, it fell.

The bridge to Dyersburg, Tennessee, begun in 1969 and finished in 1976, is the only Mississippi River bridge between Cairo, Illinois, and Memphis. On April 2, 2006, tornadoes damaged or destroyed about 60 percent of Caruthersville.