There was Biggie and her three children, one being my mother Mary Ann, and enough for a guest supper that night. Biggie agreed and with a handshake his rent was paid in full for a year. He wanted to set up a tent on her property on Tunica Lake and he would pay a yearly fee of 5 catfish per year, caught that day, skinned and ready to cook. The Corps dredged in the north and the south end of the lake and created Tunica Lake, one of the best hunting and fishing lakes within 200 miles of Memphis Tennessee.īiggie was on the porch, in the swing, in the Spring of 1958 when a bearded man came up the drive. This created an oxbow (horseshoe) lake named the Tunica Cutoff after the Corps’ name for the project. With their dredge and a ton of dynamite the US Army Corps of Engineers changed the course of the Mighty Mississippi and shortened a 20 mile bend to a 1/2 mile long straight waterway. The Tunica Curve was a 20 mile bend in the river with the North and South ends of curve 1/2 mile apart. In 1947 the US Army Corps of Engineers did the last rechannelization of the Mississippi River. My Grandfather passed away in 1942 and my Grandmother, Biggie, ran everything. The property is located on the East bank of the Mississippi River at Mile Marker 632, which means we are 632 miles from New Orleans by way of the Mississippi River. In 1937 the Yazoo Mississippi Delta Levee was being built and they purchased the land from my family, the Owen’s, and built the levee across the property, putting the 40 acres inside the levee.

In those days a plantation couldn’t operate without a mule breeder, and that was what Grandaddy loved. Grandaddy was a Champaign mule trader and he and Mike Costalo, the King of the Gypsies, were mule suppliers. In 1934 my Grandfather John Tait bought this property from the Woolfolk family and became a farmer. Before the Civil War began, Mark Twain piloted his paddlewheeler steamer around what is now our Tunica Lake. In 1620 Hernando Desoto discovered the Mississippi River in Tunica County, Mississippi. Native Indian tribes, knowing the contour of the land, always built their villages on the highest lands along the Mississippi to be protected from the annual flooding. Bordeaux Point RV Park, being at an elevation of 192′, or a Memphis River Gauge of 37 feet, is the highest elevation on the Mississippi River in Tunica County.

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