Places: Fort Tombecbe Monument, Epes, Alabama

The area comprising the states of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama passed from one colonial power to another prior to being acquired during the Louisiana Purchase of 1802.  Beginning as French possessions, they also were under British and later Spanish control.  One site that exemplifies this is Fort Tombecbe, now just a historical marker near Epes, Sumter County, Alabama.

Fort Tombecbe was built in 1736-37 under the direction of Jean-Baptiste le Moyne de Bienville, then Governor of the Louisiana territory.  As covered in the last post, this was at the height of the French/Choctaw war with the Chickasaw British.  Built on a limestone bluff 270 miles upriver from Mobile on the Tombigbee River, de Bienville intended it as a fort to protect the Choctaw from the Chickasaw and facilitate trade between the French and their allies.  Actually, it was a staging area for his disastrous raids on the Chickasaw and intended to deter the British from further incursion into French Territory.

The British acquired the Fort in 1763 under the Treaty of Paris which ended the French and Indian/Seven Years War (1755-1763).  It was renamed Fort York.  They later abandoned the outpost and it was reacquired by the site's original custodians, the Choctaw.  The Spanish acquired the site from the Choctaw by a treaty and renamed it Fort Confederacion, but they took abandoned it in turn.  The outpost was too remote to make a permanent garrison feasible.  The United States acquired the land, but the old fort was used as a trading post, not a military garrison.  It fell into disuse and was abandoned in the 19th century and played no part in the Civil War.  It is now on land owned by the University of West Alabama and nothing remains of it but a marker overgrown by brush.