Old cotton slide at Claiborne, Alabama blamed for the death of reckless Yankee soldier in 1865

The old cotton slide and steps at Claiborne, Alabama.

My wife Crystal and I spent a couple of hours Sunday afternoon paddling our kayaks from the Claiborne Lock & Dam to the boat landing at the Claiborne-Murphy Bridge. The trip by river is only about six miles, and it was a nice way to spend a Sunday afternoon. We encountered a few boaters and fishermen, but thankfully no giant alligators or snakes.

At the end of our trip, as we hauled our kayaks up the steep boat ramp, I was reminded that the once sizeable city of Claiborne once sat at the top of this high bluff. Countless Claiborne residents and visitors in days of old would have made this same trip up from the muddy banks of the river to the top of the bluff, which is said to be the highest bluff on the river between Montgomery to Mobile. However, in years past, many of them would have used the old cotton slide steps that were once located not far from where the boat landing is today.

This cotton slide, which has been long gone for years, included a steep set of stairs that ran from a warehouse at the top of the bluff to a steamboat landing at the bottom. Most accounts say that this set of stairs had 365 steps and also included a track by which a car was lowered and hauled up by means of a rope that was wound around a vertical windlass by a horse moving in a circle at the top of the bluff. This car was used for the transportation of freight.

Between the car tracks there was a slide upon which bales of cotton were sent down to be taken aboard by the river boats. Sources say that if one stood at the top of the slide and looked down to the river, the steamboat at the landing looked like a toy. At one time, the steps, slides and tracks were covered with a shed that ran all the way down to the water and if you looked down the hill through this shed it was like looking through the big end of a spy glass.

When boats approached the landing, the crew would sound a whistle and a warehouse clerk would come down to meet with the boat’s clerk to confirm how much cotton they were to load for Mobile, where it was then sent to markets around the world. Gang planks would also be thrown out and six to eight bales of cotton would be rolled off the boat and piled up to make a barrier to stop the bales sent down the slide.

The first bales sent down would move slowly over the slide’s smooth wooden surface, but after several had been sent down, they would “move with a rapidity that was frightful,” sources say. One story that I found, in an 1888 edition of The Monroe Journal, told of how a Yankee soldier was killed at Claiborne in the winter of 1865 when he attempted to ride a cotton bale to the bottom of the cotton slide.

“When the bale struck the bales at the landing, a speck of blue was seen to shoot across the bow of the boat. There was a splash in the middle of the river and one soldier less in Sherman’s Army.”