And you used to be able to find Davy Crockett in a bar in Memphis by following signs.

While he was sitting in a tavern right here, the tavern’s owner talked him into running for Congress. Four terms later, after losing his seat, Crockett delivered a great parting line to the House, and this is a real quote, “You can all go to hell, I will go to Texas.”

We all know how that worked out. We remember The Alamo.

Conaway: At minimum, a wake-up call

And you used to be able to find the original Memphis waterfront by following signs.

It was all spread out right in front of that tavern, bustling with frontier commerce, and growing with the demand for that commerce, accessible by the great river that connected the new town to the new country, to the world.

Davy is gone. The tavern is gone. The waterfront is gone. And the signs that told you they were there are gone as well.

Our history is getting lost. That just doesn’t track for me.

I’ve written about these particular signs before, and there’s no sign, literally, that anybody’s paying attention. I drove by the historical corner of both signs recently and they’re, well, history.

Conaway: Pauses in the flow, a city’s tragic losses

The sign about the tavern and Davy has been beheaded. The sign about the original waterfront is bent and scarred, hidden amidst weeds and behind untamed bushes. When I visited a couple of days ago, two abandoned shoes from different pairs rested on the sad sidewalk in front of it.

So, let’s go over this again.

The tavern was also a store and the first of both in Memphis. The proprietor was Marcus Winchester, who was also the first Mayor of Memphis and the son of General James Winchester, one of our founders.

Memphis was an 1819 business venture by Winchester and two other partners, Andrew Jackson, and John Overton. They had acquired two adjoining 5,000-acre parcels on the Fourth Chickasaw Bluff where they laid out a city.

General Winchester was a bit of a romantic and classicist. Bit of an adman, too. He named the proposed city Memphis, promoting the Mississippi as the American Nile and the new city as a future commercial and cultural center like ancient Memphis. Cities weren’t the only things he named that way. Marcus’ brothers and sisters were named Brutus, Selina, Lucilius, Almire, Napoleon and — my favorite — Valerius Publicola.

Conaway: The Lucca Model — a proposal

Very first thing, the General put his son in charge of selling the city, and Marcus set up shop on what is now the southeast corner of Jackson and Front. An MLGW substation stands there now, and a post that once held the beheaded plaque that told the reader some of the above — including the cool tidbit I led with in its last line:

Marcus convincing his buddy Davy to run for the U.S. Congress.

Across Front on the northwest corner of the same corner, at the on-ramp to I-40 and the bridge, is another plaque — not beheaded, not yet ­­— but lost from view and care. It marks something very important, and mostly unknown:

It marks where we first were, and where we almost ceased to be.

Right below, right where Bass Pro in The Pyramid sits, was the first Memphis waterfront. No Wolf River. No Harbor Town. In fact, no Mud Island at all.

Conaway: The Tasteful List 2022

Paddy Meagher, a fixture on the Chickasaw Bluffs since 1783, built the first warehouse on the Memphis waterfront here in 1823. Emmanuel Young came along in 1829 and built the city’s first brick structure right next door to Paddy. You might say it was built like a brick … er … warehouse. Even had a freight elevator.

And Memphis held its first stage performance in Young’s place in 1829. It wasn’t Elvis, but since Memphis was full of flatboaters, land speculators, tavern owners, frontiersmen and first-generation German and Irish laborers, you can bet it wasn’t Shakespeare either.

Across and below Marcus and directly below Paddy’s and Manny’s, steamboats were swarming the waterfront like mosquitoes, flatboats filled the mouth of the Gayoso Bayou, and Memphis was a city on the rise like the Mississippi at springtime.

A couple of years later there was no waterfront.

The harbor was filling with silt so fast that the city was in danger of losing the cotton shipping and riverboats to Randolph, a natural harbor in the river just north in Tipton County.

Conaway: ‘I intend to live forever. So far, so good.’

The Randolph Blues doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, does it?

So, the city up and moved the waterfront south in 1830. That’s about when those cobblestones went in, not at the city’s founding. That’s when the pristine view our land-speculating founders originally saw from the bluff became an unforeseen wharf.

The original waterfront ran from Jackson to Auction. The Gayoso Bayou has long since been covered, and all that bothersome silt became Mud Island.

Now before you think that I worked my little fingers to the bone Googling all these obscure historical references, before you email and text suggesting that I get a life, all this about the waterfront came from that one plaque — one forlorn little sign about 30” x 24,” listing to starboard in the weeds by that I-40 on-ramp at Jackson and Front.

Those plaques and that corner are too important to ignore. If we choose to tell a more complete story about Andrew Jackson, this is the spot. If we’d like to talk about practically stealing the land from the Chickasaw, let’s have at it.

Conaway: The winds blow hard Downtown

But doing nothing about our city’s point of origin shouldn’t be an option. There was and is life before and after Bass Pro.

Those plaques named some names and places we need to note.

So, I’m going to name some names:

Mayor Strickland, note and mark our first mayor, and clean up his place. This is where we began, and this is embarrassing.

Kevin Kane, president and CEO of Memphis Tourism, note and mark some interesting history for our many visitors. They may not know all these folks, but they know Andy Jackson and Davy Crockett and connections and introductions should be made.

Chance and Chase Carlisle, the Sheraton C-suite, The Peabody, the renovated Convention Center, everybody with a room night or an available table, get with Kevin and get something going here.

Conaway: Weekend’s golf tournament has everything to do with us

Carol Coletta, CEO of Memphis River Parks Partnership, you’re in need of positive connections to our waterfront, historical reference to its colorful history, and the importance of adapting to current need. Well, here’s the first precedent.

Paul Young, president and CEO of the Downtown Memphis Commission, since Marcus, Paddy and Manny were the original Downtown, they deserve to be a part of what’s going on now.

Johnny Morris, CEO of Bass Pro Shops, you’re sitting on the original Memphis waterfront, and if we don’t how to promote, you certainly do, so, see all of the above.

Jimmy Rout, Shelby County Historian, you’re probably way ahead of me in following up on all of this. If not, catch up.

Just south of this corner, there’s a forgotten plaza, now a wide spot in the sidewalk, and a lane to pull in and unload cars and buses for The Pyramid, now facing a moat full of railroad tracks and an inaccessible Bass Pro.

For the future of the Pinch District, for the connection — literal and symbolic ­— of Bass Pro to the rest of this city, for our tourism and a hook to history, the oft-mentioned bridge across that moat needs to happen.

This part of our past is alive with future potential. Right now, it’s just dead.

I’m a Memphian, and now we all know where this whole thing really started.