Developers bulldoze historic Robinson Spring

Developers: 1; History, 0

Drivers passing a massive construction site along U.S. 80 in Clinton, Mississippi, no longer can catch a glimpse of area history in the form of an ancient freshwater spring.

All evidence of the scenic historic site known as Robinson Spring, which provided drinking water for Native Americans, Civil War soldiers and local residents over multiple centuries, has been obliterated.

Developers of what’s known as the Rising Spring mixed-use real estate project – the name an ironic allusion to the now-destroyed site -- had previously promised that Robinson Spring would be incorporated into the plan’s design. Yet bulldozers and other earthmoving equipment wasted no time scraping away the artesian outcropping, along with its old brick retaining walls and sylvan setting of ferns, towering trees and aquatic plants. Not a trace is left.

Nor is there any surviving evidence of the old Natchez Trace, the frontier road stretching from Nashville to Natchez that passed by the spring, which, as a popular source of drinking water for travelers and locals, led to the original settlement of what is today the city of Clinton, a sprawling, unplanned bedroom community west of Jackson.

Instead, there is a bare field of dirt punctuated by drainage structures. The spring’s ever-flowing waters have been shunted to underground conduits, buried under tons of fill dirt to make way for the development.

Robinson Spring was referenced in a previous episode of What Happened that included a link to a YouTube video posted by an area resident in 2021, which shows water burbling from within a circle of old, mossy brickwork, in a verdant ravine of ferns, elephant ears and magnolia trees.

The site’s longevity and importance was noted in a 1988 article in The Clinton News, which reported that Robinson Spring had been referenced in a government survey conducted in 1802-1803 for the purpose of improving the Natchez Trace for travel. The WPA Guide to the Magnolia State, published in 1938 by the federal Works Progress Administration, likewise devotes considerable space to Robinson Spring and adjacent historic structures that have similarly vanished.

In 2005, a local historian asked the Mississippi Department of Archives and History to assess the spring’s eligibility for inclusion in the National Register of Historic Places, in hopes of protecting it during the widening of U.S. 80, but the agency’s then-program supervisor, Richard Cawthon, responded that there was not “sufficient interpretive context” to propose listing it. As a result of that odd rejection – what, exactly, does “sufficient interpretive context” mean? -- the spring was afforded no official protection. (Ultimately, the U.S. 80 project did not directly impact it.)

A news release from the developers of Rising Spring promised that the centerpiece of the project would be “a historic spring and canopy of trees preserved as an inviting ‘green space’ for pedestrians.” In August 2022, while the development was being planned, Mississippi College offered an assurance that “Robinson Spring, a natural water source that has served the people of Clinton for generations, will be preserved, and its historical significance will become a feature of the development.” As late as May 2024, The Clinton Courier reported that the spring would be preserved and quoted a developer saying the plan was “to capture the water and convey the water and possibly bring that water up into a feature above ground.” Lots of wiggle room there. Since then, the “historic spring and canopy of trees” have been bulldozed and buried.

According to the webpage of a Clinton historical walking tour, Robinson Spring was named for Col. Raymond Robinson, a veteran of the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 who owned the surrounding land in the 1830s. The site notes that the spring was neglected for years but that in the late 1980s, Joy Nobles, wife of then-Mississippi College president Lewis Nobles, led a major effort to restore it.

Less than four decades later, Nobles’ and others’ efforts to preserve Robinson Spring have come to naught. After hundreds and perhaps thousands of years of providing pure, abundant natural drinking water, Robinson Spring is now history.

When future area residents and historians wonder what became of Robinson Spring, the answer will be that it was subsumed by what, in historical terms, represents a temporary cash-out for a real estate development, despite the fact that, as this site notes, “Robinson Spring is one of the biggest reasons Clinton was settled.”

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Images: Robinson Spring in 2021 (screencap from SuperDaveVideos/YouTube); former site of Robinson Spring, Dec. 5, 2024 (author)