Ohio River Meets Mississippi River

Fisk 1944 Alluvial Valley of the Lower Mississippi River plate_22-1 smaller — Ancient courses of the Mississippi River at the Confluence of the Ohio Harold Fisk. 1944. The Alluvial Valley of the Lower Mississippi River. U.A. Ground forces Corps of Engineers.

Illinois, Alexander Canton, Cairo

981

Access to river: yes. Tree cover: somewhat open. Impermeable surface: some. Landscape design strategy: State Park style. Information about the Ohio River: some. — Access to river: yep. Tree encompass: somewhat open up. Impermeable surface: some. Landscape design strategy: State Park way. Information about the Ohio River: some.

"Information technology's a crime," said ane member of the enquiry team "that this is non a national park!" The inquiry team was talking on this sunny October Sunday afternoon with ii couples from far away who came to see this site. One — a couple in their 50's from Indianapolis — was completing the last leg of a motorbike trip around the lower Mississippi. The other — a couple in their thirties — stopped by here on a bulldoze from their habitation in Arkansas to a visit with family near Chicago. Both were impressed with the Convergence, only disappointed that then little is made of it. Lots of people on Tripadvisor experience the same way.

The thing is — this WAS a park. Fort Defiance State Park, operated past the Department of Natural Resources of the Country of Illinois. Information technology is no longer on the DNR's list of parks just it persists on many maps and many websites. The only written evidence at the park itself is the IDNR label on a trash can.

Simply the material show is great: the copse in line, sliced by narrow roads, bordered by an abandoned swing ready — surely the marks of an abandoned campground. The parking lot adjacent to the boat launch, the concrete shards where the gunkhole launch has been broken up. (In retrospect, the turbulent waters of the Confluence may non exist the best place to launch.) An odd concrete overlook in the class of a steamboat. Now information technology has been straightened upwardly plenty that one can walk up to the outset and second floors, but the doors to the restrooms and concession stand are welded shut. The mysterious concrete platform. The airtight up edifice at the bridges. The numerous advisory signs of various condition and vintage describing Lewis and Clark, Fort Defiance, the Civil War, the Great River Route, the location of the third acme, the public fine art project, and the WPA-built span. (Thank you, beau citizens, for providing work temporarily for those who had no work when the economy was in such a peachy recession, and for building infrastructure that still serves u.s.a. when those who built information technology are long deceased.)

The existence of this park is made more difficult past the treacherous condition of downtown Cairo. Historic preservationists talk virtually how, when one or two buildings of a block are lost, it no longer shows the friendly smile of a complete a set of teeth. So many buildings have been demolished or abased that downtown Cairo looks like a mouth with merely two or iii rotten teeth left. With a population in 2010 of 2800 and a median household income of $16,500 (versus about $50,000 for the United states as a whole), there is not much hope here. (Ane neighborhood, and many surrounding towns, are much more than prosperous.) With merely a few dismal-looking bars, no place to consume, and a forlorn inexpensive motel out by the Interstate, driving through or thinking of staying are daunting prospects. Probably a thriving park could practice much to revive it.

But it should not be a city park or a county park or a state park: it should be a national park. Restore the overlook! Restore the campground! Restore the signs! A national park overseen by the three states that border it: Illinois, Kentucky, and Missouri. (Illinois has simply one national park; Kentucky has Mammoth Cave and Missouri the Arch at St. Louis, forth with a handful of others.) But information technology will get inundated, you object. Yep — it Volition get inundated — and that is the point of it. This is not a park almost some Ceremonious War battle or some local important man — the appropriate subject for many local riverside parks. This is a park well-nigh WATER! The Ohio River drains — what, nearly of the eastern third of the The states? The Upper Mississippi and the Missouri drain from Minnesota to Montana to Saskatchewan to Alberta to Colorado to Kansas. And all this water flows into the Gulf of Mexico at the Mississippi Delta. Here — as at Niagara Falls, as at the Grand Coulee, h2o is the power and the glory and the motivating force. To see this park now — belatedly summertime, low water, then to come back in January for some ice, and April and May when only the information building and the bridge would be above an enormous puddle — that would tell all of us something of the environment and ecology of these neat rivers. Get on it!