Bluff City bicentennial: In Memphis, the way we were reflects the way we are

• 'What you see today is no different from what was happening in the 1820s,' Frank Stewart says
• 'Memphis always has had this frontier mentality,' Wayne Dowdy says
• Midtowners speak of Memphis as a 'living, breathing thing.' People love this city

On a high bank of windblown glacial grit long ranged over by ancient tribes of bison hunters, a trio of English-speaking businessmen founded a town. They named the place Memphis. It was May 22, 1819.

Two hundred years later, 1.4 million people live in the vicinity. Other than street and park names, old documents and a relatively small number of descendants, Memphis in its bicentennial year shows few visible signs Andrew Jackson, John Overton and James Winchester ever stood on that river bluff, though they were here, briefly. They were real estate speculators. They came and left.

“The founders never really lived here,’’ Memphis historian Jimmy Ogle said.

To say the modern city’s charming grace and continual whiff of anarchy are an odd contradiction left by Jackson, Overton and Winchester is going too far. Yet Memphis has a distinct personality for a reason. The way we are, historians contend, reflects the way we were.

“What you see today is no different from what was happening in the 1820s,’’ said Winchester descendant Frank Stewart, archivist specialist for the Shelby County Archives. “The heart of man does not change.”

Sprawled along an old buffalo trail, now the paved spine of the prosperous Poplar Corridor, Memphis has made something of itself since the founders stood at the outer limits of American civilization. Winchester’s son, Marcus, would lead early Memphis, though only for a time. The town took on the character not of the absent founders, but  of the waves of settlers migrating to the steamboat landing for jobs and opportunity. 

“Socially and economically it has resembled Chicago far more closely than it has resembled any southern town,” historian Gerald Capers Jr. wrote in his 1966 book, "The Biography of a River Town." ”Figuratively and literally, the South met the West in Memphis.”

Most towns aren't like this. Puritans founded Boston, a prim city deep into the 20th century. Detroit heeded the Puritan praise for education and trained generations of engineers. Quakers built the orderly civic bedrock for Indianapolis, a region with more jobs today than Nashville. Dutch traders created New York, today’s global finance capital. Atlanta was a railroader’s concoction, short for Atlantica and Pacifica, and retains a cheery boosterism to this day. And Memphis?

Memphis reflects frontier roots

“Memphis always has had this frontier mentality. From the very start it has never been a town that accepts authority willingly,’’ said Wayne Dowdy, senior manager of the Memphis Public Libraries' history department. “From the start there was controversy. The proprietors wanted to create a city government. That was the last thing the settlers wanted. They were used to being ungoverned. Out of that comes this quickness to protest things you don’t care for. We see it in Memphis today.”

It’s not only quick-on-the-draw protest. There’s the quiet anarchy — like the soda can tossed out the car window. Or the driver who bolts into an I-240 exit from the far-left lane. Or the trigger pulled in a flash of anger. Sorrow, homicides and theft are incessant, just as in the 1830s, when, Capers notes, the port “had more than its share of gamblers and robbers.’’

Sorrow aside, many find life here vivid and captivating. It is not uncommon to hear a man waiting in a fast-food order line sing gospel and sing it well. Memphians talk always of the music, the churches, the food, the fun, the innovation and creativity, the friendly nature of close family, and the avid interest in sports teams, golf courses, bike trails,  fishing water, duck ponds and deer haunts.

Apryl Childs-Potter, a Greater Memphis Chamber marketing analyst herself descended from a Mississippi River towboat captain, has pointed out some young adults surveyed in Midtown in recent years spoke of Memphis as if — in her words — it was a “living, breathing thing.” People love this city.

View depends on where you stand

Love of place. Sorrow. Anarchy. Some traits never cease. Memphis thrived by 1850, Capers wrote, although “in the numerous dives, gambling dens and bawdy houses the scum of the river still congregated and life there was cheap and murder commonplace.”

Seen from the outside, Memphis was merely the sum of its vice. For the comfortable planters in the quiet farm towns like Brownsville in West Tennessee, Capers wrote, Memphis was the chaotic Babylon to be avoided like a “vicious young giant on the bluff.”

Even today, the city’s reputation depends on where you stand. In white suburbs, for example, some liken urban areas such as Whitehaven to slums. Whitehaven is not that. Even so, just as 1850s Brownsville did not fully comprehend Memphis, white and black residents today might well inhabit different tribes. “It has been a very conflicted city,” Ogle said.

Yale Law School graduate Lee Harris, elected Shelby County mayor in August, recalled growing up in 1990s Whitehaven, then and now a middle- and working-class district of 90,000. "I had the complete black experience," Harris once said, noting he had no white friends then. Not until attending college in New England did he navigate white culture.

Fever leveled Memphis

America as a civilization is an invention, an experiment in self-government tracing to the thoughts and deeds of founders such as Adams, Jefferson and Madison and the Constitution they created. Downtown streets are named for them. And who defined Memphis? Ask Ogle who stood out over the first century and a half, and he lists black millionaire Robert Church, political boss E.H. Crump and philanthropist Abe Plough.

No one he lists lived in Memphis in the time of Winchester or Capers' Babylon era. There’s a reason. That city vanished. Settlers started along Front Street near today's  Pyramid. These days, the empty lots look abandoned, although these streets once were lively.

"Biography of River Town" notes 1850 Memphis “with its cotton trade, rail and river traffic, wholesale houses, and professional men, its six newspapers, twenty-one churches, three female seminaries, two medical schools, twenty-one public schools and glamorous theater was for its day a real city.”

It wasn’t the 1860s’ Civil War that changed the place. Memphis fared well then. It was the next decade's fatal epidemics. Wealthier families fled the yellow fellow and never returned, leaving behind people too poor to move. Most who stayed died.

“It was a thriving, beautiful place and suddenly everybody left,” said Stewart, an officer in a Memphis group named the Descendants of Early Settlers of Shelby County and Adjoining Counties. “It became a ghost town.”

Migration wave resettles Memphis

Gradually, the fever eased. New sewers helped. Empty buildings attracted newcomers. Many, like the Ploughs, were part of the late 19th-century European rush of Christians and Jews to America.

Even more migrants, like Crump, came from small towns in North Mississippi and West Tennessee. By 1900, the city population neared 100,000; only 10% had been born in Memphis. America industrialized back then. Sawmills sprang open in Memphis, shipped hardwood nationwide. By 1920, almost 20% of the Mississippi Delta had been cleared of virgin timber.

The sawmills were joined by Chicago Bridge and Iron, E.L. Bruce, Firestone, Ford, General Motors, HumKo, International Harvester, Memphis Furniture, Plough’s chemical company and dozens of other factories.

Part of the city is still called New Chicago.

Small-town ideals sway Memphis

Even in the industrial era, few Memphians were drawn to the ideas of Northern cities. Having recently arrived, many black and white families kept their hometown beliefs and traditions.

"There is this larger population that even today has a very small-town attitude,” Dowdy said. “I don’t say that as a bad thing. There’s more intimacy here. We know or think we know everyone in town.’’

When a call for order followed late 19th-century violence, Crump stepped up. While the political leader never tamed the city, he buffered the factions. Nightlife in Church’s Beale Street properties thrived, while Crump courted the upscale class of bankers, cotton aristocrats, lawyers, merchants and industrialists, and reached out to the city’s white small-town traditionalists.

First a progressive, later a ruler, Crump ran the city, at times giving voice to Catholics, women and African Americans. Still, small-town ways persisted, said the Rev. Kenneth Whalum Jr., pastor of New Olivet Worship Center in Memphis.

"Blacks experienced a small-town racist ethos they thought they were escaping when they moved to the big city on the bluff," Whalum said. "They could not escape it because the same white folks moved to the city.’’

Once the civil rights movement arose in the 1960s, segregation would ease, even as economic conditions hardened for many. Factories closed, part of America's deindustrialization. Memphis remained three broad camps — African Americans, white traditionalists and upscale professionals, whose certainty on how to manage the city was shaken after Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination in Memphis in 1968.

Into the 21st century, no single preacher, politician or business leader would harness the camps, although education emerged as an upscale goal to ease poverty in recent years. Even so, few Memphians understood how to bridge the racial divide. Noted Stewart: Most people still see the city from their own camps.  

“We’ve had a cultural lag in Memphis since the end of the 19th century,” Stewart said. “Ideas will rise up in other parts of the country. Our attitude is, ‘Let’s give it time and see what is good and what is bad and then decide whether we want to take it on.’ ”

That attitude underpins the city’s graceful charm, a live-and-let-live style. It also gives rise to outbursts by people who, for whatever reason, want something else, like Elvis singing black songs. 

“There’s the dichotomy to the city,” said Dowdy, author of "A Brief History of Memphis." “We are a polite town, a friendly town, but if you edge below that friendliness you get a sense of anger and violence. I think the innovation and creativity we see around us in Memphis comes out of that tension. There’s an unwillingness to follow trends and authority.

"I think it’s difficult for the kind of corporate culture to exist here as it probably does in Nashville," Dowdy said. "It seems to me at the same time it’s somewhat easier to come here and build a strange new business. A lot of people may not care to help you. There can be a coolness shown to strangers, but the people in Memphis will not get in your way.’’

Memphis faces new frontiers

It has been 201 years since the Chickasaw Nation ceded the high river bank and West Tennessee to the U.S. government. What came next was a culture Hollywood never could invent. A place singularly American, Memphis at once is the Delta blues' spiritual home and a city where people still talk in close detail of the grim maneuvers by 111,000 armed men at Shiloh as if the Yankee general, Ulysses Grant, had strode into Memphis only yesterday.

In spite of the camps dividing Memphians, a new tribe has emerged. Restless, small in number, black and white, younger and less full of tradition, it is driven by a kind of duty into a new frontier.

Some aim to cure poverty, disease or the racial divide; others heal the sorrow, make music, make something no one else has made or simply make a better life for people. Underlying all this is a spirit rooted in the sage words of the late William Faulkner, the Nobel laureate author raised not far from Shiloh: "The past isn't dead. It isn't even past." 

Ted Evanoff, business columnist of The Commercial Appeal, can be reached at evanoff@commercialappeal.com and (901) 529-2292.