With the Goddard back in tip-top shape after a visit to an RV service center in Tishomingo, Mississippi, we headed back north to the east side of the Mississippi River and Memphis, Tennessee. Gunther and Rusty had both been boarded in Memphis during the Tishomingo work, and all four of us spent a little over a week camping at T.O. Fuller State Park in the southwestern corner of the city (it’s one of the rare state parks in the country that’s contained entirely within a major city).
The city of Memphis, Tennessee, was founded in 1819 and named after the ancient capital of Egypt, which, like the Tennessee city, is located on a prominent river. Nancy and I like Memphis a lot; we’d traveled to the city for a few days several years prior to our 2022 visit and really enjoyed the city’s cultural history, music, and food (which, in a great place like Memphis, all get kind of wondrously mixed up together).
Memphis is home to the National Civil Rights Museum, which incorporates the Lorraine Motel where Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968. Memphis is home to Graceland, where Elvis Presley and his family lived, and where he recorded much of his music. Memphis was home to Sun Records, the recording company founded by Sam Phillips in which Presley, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, and so many others got their start. Memphis was home to Stax Records, the studio that released incredible music by Carla Thomas, Booker T. & the M.G.s, Otis Redding, and Isaac Hayes, among many others. Memphis is home to world-renowned barbecue restaurants, and it’s home to a lot of establishments that offer the best of live rhythm & blues and soul music – many of which are on the famous Beale Street, which is itself an open-air celebration of music and food. I should mention here that Nancy and I like Memphis a lot, or maybe I already did.
When planning our trip north in the summer of 2022, then, it was an easy decision to include Memphis in our travels. We decided to park the Goddard at T.O. Fuller State Park – one of the few state parks in the country to be fully inside a major city.
The Goddard’s first destination following warranty repairs (bathroom pocket door back on track, gray water valve operational, and other minor things) in Tishomingo was the heavily forested T.O. Fuller State Park in Memphis, Tennessee, a short distance from the mighty Mississippi River – and directly across the river from our previous campground in West Memphis. It was, by far, the campground with the most overhead tree coverage we’d stayed in to that point, or since. It was so dark inside the Goddard in the daytime that we turned the interior lights on. It was also very, very humid in late June and early July, and the bugs were very, very loud — at times it was nigh impossible to carry on a conversation outside.The 1,138-acre T.O Fuller State Park is very near the east bank of the Mississippi River, and its forest provides habitat for a large variety of birds and animals. A number of hiking trails wind through the forest, which gave Nancy and me, who had both spent most of our lives in Colorado, an opportunity to see a number of plants and trees that were new to us. There were plenty of insects and birds, although, thanks to all of the dense foliage, I didn’t get any good photos of the latter – I did see my first-ever Mississippi kite, though, as it soared over the campground.
The park was a Civilian Conservation Corps project begun in 1938, and was opened as Shelby County Negro State Park – the first state park east of the Mississippi open to African Americans. In 1942 the park was renamed in honor of Dr. Thomas O. Fuller (Oct. 25, 1867 – June 21, 1942), an African-American educator, clergyman, and civic leader.
Dr. T.O. Fuller was the son of a North Carolina carpenter who’d had to purchase his freedom from slavery. Both of Fuller’s parents could read, and they encouraged their children to become educated as well. Fuller earned a master’s degree from Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, and moved to Memphis in the early 20th century. He became an important leader in Memphis religious and political activities, and founded a real estate company that helped many African-American Memphians to purchase their own business properties in the city. Fuller also wrote a number of books that chronicled little-known histories of African Americans. (Photo courtesy of T.O. Fuller State Park.)
Preserving the park’s history as a CCC project, T.O. Fuller State Park today also offers a wealth of recreational activities, including hiking trails, playgrounds, an Olympic-sized swimming pool, and ballfields as well as basketball and tennis courts.
A couple of state park rangers were kind enough to take Nancy and me on a nature hike one early afternoon. We saw quite a few butterflies, including this black swallowtail (Papilionidae polyxenes). In addition to being absolutely lovely to observe, nsects like this species are important pollinators for flowering plants.
Chucalissa
When we made our plans to camp at T.O. Fuller State Park, we had no idea that an important archeological site is within its borders. While digging in the earth for the park’s construction in the 1930s, workers uncovered evidence of a Native American culture that had lived on the bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River. Archeologists called the site Chucalissa, a Choctaw word that means “abandoned house,” for the site. A Memphis Press Scimitar article from 1940 related that Chucalissa “was literally ankle-deep in crumbling bones, bricks, and ancient pottery.”
A research team from the Works Progress Administration began excavating the site and found the remains of a large village with ceremonial and burial mounds. It’s believed that Chucalissa was built beginning around the year 1000, and was occupied until around the time of European exploration of the American continent in the 1500s. The Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto visited other villages along the Mississippi, but it’s thought that Chucalissa had already been abandoned by the time he reached the area around present-day Memphis.
The museum at Chucalissa includes this interesting diorama representing what the scientists believe the village looked like, complete with homes and other buildings, as well as crops growing next to the Mississippi River.This view, looking west toward the Mississippi River on the other side of the trees, is the site of the village’s plaza as it looked on the day Nancy and I visited Chucalissa. The area is defined by three residential ridges. Archeologists believe construction of the large mound on the right side of the photo started around the year 1350, when Chucalissa’s population was at its peak. Researchers rarely find any artifacts in open areas like this. That lack of materials, along with the European explorers’ documentation of how southeast Native American peoples used open spaces in the 1500s, leads to the belief that the plaza was used much as town squares and parks are used today: a shared place for people to gather.We saw a lot of these dragonflies, called common whitetail skimmers (Libellula lydia), while walking around Chucalissa. The species, which measures about 1 3/4 inches long, prefers to perch on the ground. Male common whitetail skimmers, like this one, develop a white powdery substance, called pruinosity, on their abdomens; the females have brown abdomens. The males raise their bright abdomens to warn other males against intruding on their territories. This species is apparently found all across the country, but I’d sure never seen one.We’ve enjoyed seeing new animals in different parts of the country, and we’ve also had the opportunity to see plants that are new to us. This beautiful tree growing near the Chucalissa visitor center is an American sycamore (Platanus occidentalis). They can grow up to 100 feet tall and have the largest trunks of any native American tree, with some specimens having trunk diameters up to 15 feet. To accommodate that growth, the tree often sheds its bark in large pieces. The American sycamore is very common in the eastern part of the country, but the furthest west it grows is the eastern parts of Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. American sycamores commonly live for 200 years, and some can grow for more than twice that. The wood is used to make butchers’ blocks, as well as furniture and musical instruments.
It’s interesting to note that when archeologists were excavating the thousand-year-old Chucalissa site, they happened to pull some much more recent artifacts from the ground: farming tools and household goods from the 1800s. They were left by African-Americans homesteaders, who built their lives in the area now known as T.O. Fuller State Park. I like to think that it’s entirely possible that their descendants were aided in bettering their lives by T.O. Fuller himself.
Chucalissa was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1994. The grounds include a very fine museum, named after a prominent archeologist at Chucalissa, C.H. Nash, and a visitor center operated by the University of Memphis.
Seeing Chucalissa was a pleasantly unexpected aspect of our trip to Memphis. Having spent most of our lives in Colorado, Nancy and I are much more familiar with nomadic Native American tribes like the Arapahoe, Cheyenne, and Ute; since seeing more of the southwest, we’ve learned about the Apache, the Hopi, and the Navajo, as well as their ancient forebears. Chucalissa was our first experience of a culture that lived next to a tremendous river – and for nearly twice as long as the United States has been established.
More Memphis
Having visited the National Civil Rights Museum, the Stax Museum of American Soul Music, Graceland, the Memphis Rock ‘N’ Soul Museum on our previous trip to Memphis, Nancy and I concentrated our attention in 2022 on barbecue, Beale Street, and baseball. There’s a particular barbecue restaurant in downtown Memphis that we really like, and we made time to visit it twice while we were there last summer (and I’d go again, twice, right now). Beale Street was a little more muted than when we’d previously been in Memphis, but the pandemic and the fact that it was daylight outside probably had a lot to do with that. Then there’s baseball.
We took the opportunity to take in a Memphis Redbirds game at the ol’ AutoZone Park. The Redbirds are the AAA affiliate of the St. Louis Cardinals, who play their home games at the ol’ Busch Stadium 300 miles north of Memphis (it’s not really the “ol'” Busch Stadium; the current one opened in 2006, replacing the kinda ol’ Busch Stadium which had been built in 1966). AutoZone Park isn’t really ol’ either; it opened in 2000 with a seating capacity of 14,000 that has since been reduced to 10,000. The park offers great views of downtown Memphis buildings, as well as lovely cloud formations over western Tennessee.The Redbirds began play in 1998 as an expansion team of the Pacific Coast League. Memphis has a long history as a home of minor-league baseball teams, most notably the Memphis Chicks from 1901 through 1960. The Chicks started as the Memphis Egyptians, and then from 1909–1911 were the Memphis Turtles before changing their name to the Chickasaws – which was nearly always shortened to Chicks. AutoZone Park is a wonderful venue for baseball, and, because of the lack of outfield seats, it’s sometimes called “one-third of a major league ballpark.” The video scoreboard in this photo is the largest in the minor leagues, and it can be seen from many sites in downtown Memphis. Sadly, the Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp bested the Redbirds that evening by a score of 5–1, but it was still a fun ballgame to watch.Finally, a bird photo. Memphis is home to the historic Peabody Hotel, which opened in 1925 and is on the National Register of Historic Places. Among the lovely building’s more famous attributes is the daily appearance of the ducks who spend the day cavorting in the lobby fountain. That’s a solid piece of Italian marble in the fountain. The mallard ducks live on the hotel’s roof (in very nice quarters; Nancy and I visited them when we were in Memphis several years ago) and descend to the lobby via the elevator (I’m not kidding) at 11 AM and waddle to the fountain on a red carpet (I’m still not kidding). They return to their penthouse digs, via the red carpet and elevator, every evening at 5 PM. If you’re in Memphis, it’s definitely worth seeing – but plan to arrive early for the arrival or departure, because the lobby gets pretty packed with Peabody Duck enthusiasts. I took this photo when Nancy and I ducked (!) into the Peabody last June while we were downtown to get some more barbecue.
It’s often said of many cities across the country and the world that “they’re nice places to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there.” Despite having an abundance of things that make Nancy and me happy, like interesting history, lovely live music, and delectable food, we could never live in Memphis – neither of us do well in heat and humidity.
But Memphis remains a great place to visit, and I’m looking forward to the next time we’re there. And now I’m hungry for some barbecue.
Tales of The Goddard 