Horseshoe Cutoff/Friars Point, Mississippi/Yazoo Pass

Horseshoe Cutoff/Friars Point, Mississippi/Yazoo Pass. Mississippi River Walk. , A) Horseshoe Cutoff , Mile 650.0 AHP, The Mississippi River cut through a neck of land here in 1848 removing the nine-mile long Horseshoe Bend from the river's channel. The bend silted up, creating Horseshoe Lake, a popular recreation area., B) Friars Point, Mississippi , Mile 652.0 AHP, Friars Point was a bustling river town in antebellum days, serving as a trade center for the surrounding cotton plantations and county seat of Coahoma County. General Grant stopped briefly at the town with a fleet of Union transports on his way to Vicksburg, MS. After the U.S. Civil War, declining river trade and lack of railroad connections contributed to the town's decline. The county seat was moved inland to Clarksdale, and Friars Point has since become a small farming community just inside the mainline levee system., C) Yazoo Pass , Mile 658.0 AHP, In the early 1800s, this narrow channel connected the Mississippi River with Moon Lake, an old oxbow lake to the east. A levee was later constructed across the channel's mouth to protect local plantations from flood waters. During the U.S. Civil War, General Grant ordered the Yazoo Pass levee blown up, so that Union gunboats could travel through Moon Lake into the local river system. One convoy made it through the waterway with great difficulty, but was stopped twice by Confederates at Fort Pemberton at Greenville, and the project was abandoned. Yazoo Pass remained open for many years, causing repeated flood damage to area farmland. It is now permanently closed by the mainline levee system.