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Most came by steamboat up the Mississippi and Ouachita to Camden, then overland in oxcarts, following the blazed trails and crude roads to the points of settlement. Some came by the east-west road that led across north Louisiana, or over the military road that had replaced the old Caddo Trace.
In the early forties the settlements centered around Glenville in the northern part of the county, Calhoun in the southeastern, Lamartine in the north central, and Brister in the south central. Atlanta in the extreme southeastern part of the county was settled about the same time by Georgians, who named it for their native city. College Hill, formerly Godbolt, became a thickly settled community grouped around W. B. McNeil's school, started in 1858. The Dorcheat or Shannon community in the west central part of the county, also became a social, commercial, educational and religious center in the fifties. (7)
Farming and lumbering have always dominated the economic life of Columbia County. In the eighteen thirties and early forties, bears, wolves and other wild animals made the raising of livestock a precarious venture. Those were the days of "squatter culture," when the chief reliance was on the long, flint-lock, steel rifle, with its buckskin covering for the flash pan in damp weather. Hunters furnished meat for the table, and peltry was the medium of exchange, taking the place of a cash crop. Only enough corn was raised to keep the family in bread and hominy.
- A few cotton plants sufficed for home manufacture
of the cloth necessary to supplement the characteristic buckskin of the
frontiersman. A few Chickasaw plum trees were the extent of the horticulture.(8)
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- 7. Unpublished manuscript written in 1932 by John Murphy, an old but mentally active ex-
- Confederate soldier; also interviews with E. L. Dudney, December 3, 1932, J. L. Davis, May 24, 1933, Mrs. Lucy Couch, July 5, 1933, and William V. Keith, October 28, 1932. See also The Weekly Magnolian, July 14, 1860; Colton's map, published by J. H. Colton, New York City, 1855. As the 1870 census shows, a large part of the early settlers came from Georgia and Alabama.
- 8. Letter of Mrs. Sarah Merritt, in the Columbia Banner, April 28, 1915; in interviews with John
- Murphy, November 11, 1932, J. A. Christie, December
23, 1932, and A. J. Harrington, December 15, 1932; Hulse, History of
Claiborne Parish, 73; Timothy Flint, Recollections of the Last Ten
Years (Boston, 1826), 328. Mrs. Merritt, who came to the county in
1843, says "when father began to raise hogs it took two boys with
their guns to keep the wolves off ..." it was customary to dig wolf
pits to rid the locality of these pests so that the hogs and sheep could
be raised with a degree of security. Interview with Tom Stevens, February
5, 1933.
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