Arrival in Massac County and Settling the Bluff

The waters of the Ohio River have always demanded a price from those who try to cross them, and in the closing years of the 1840s, they formed the absolute boundary between the world you knew and the world you had to build. When the heavy wooden hull of the flatboat finally scraped the mud of the northern bank, the ropes were thrown ashore, and the Comers set foot on Massac County soil.

The River Road

The crossing was the end of a grueling, five-day river journey that had begun roughly 120 miles backward in time and space, deep within the hills of Dickson County, Tennessee. To move a multi-generational family, their essential livestock, and two standard farm lumber wagons, the Comers had bypassed the muddy, slow-going overland trails through Kentucky and chosen the great river highway.

Their voyage began where the rolling landscape of Dickson County met the Cumberland River. There, they had loaded a massive, rectangular flatboat—essentially a floating wooden fortress steered only by long sweeps and the mercy of the current. Traveling at the standard flatboat pace of three to four miles an hour, their world for nearly a week was defined by the steady, slow-drifting pulse of the water.

The journey required navigating the lower Cumberland as it snaked northwestward through the rugged timberlands of western Kentucky. Every mile was a calculated risk. For five days, they took turns at the sweeps, watching the banks for dangerous snags, hidden sandbars, and river pirates. Below the gunwales, the family lived exposed to the elements, tending to nervous horses and cattle whose weight shifted with every roll of the river. They drifted past the tiny frontier outposts of Kentucky until they finally reached Smithland, where the Cumberland emptied its contents into the massive, sweeping expanse of the Ohio River. From that confluence, it was a straight, thirty-mile float downstream to the wild shores of Massac County.

John Epps Comer was not a young man making a reckless gamble; he was a patriarch of nearly seventy years, carrying a lifetime of American history in his bones. Born on September 4, 1782, in Antrim Parish, Halifax County, Virginia, John Epps had entered the world in the literal crucible of the Revolution. As a newborn, his first cries were echoed by the boots of General Nathanael Greene’s continental troops, who had used Halifax County as a strategic headquarters to secure the south. He had seen the birth of the United States, buried two wives—Sarah "Sally" Wood and Martha "Patsy" Steagell—and had already carved one frontier life out of the soil of Dickson County, Tennessee, alongside his third wife, Mary. Now, looking to secure a permanent future for his grown sons, the aging patriarch had taken command of the river highway to bring them here.

Beside him stood his sons, Moses Epps and Nathaniel Morgan. Born back-to-back in Halifax County, Virginia—Moses in 1814 and Nathaniel around 1816—the brothers were the muscle and endurance of this new venture. They had grown up on the move, watching the landscape shift from Virginia tobacco fields to the dense hollows of Tennessee. Grieving the loss of their mother Sarah at a young age, they had learned early on to read the seasonal shifts of the land, fell giant timber, and handle heavy teams of horses together. Now young men in their thirties with the dust of the migration trails ground deep into their boots, they operated as an inseparable team, ready to anchor the Comer name in Illinois.

They didn't travel light. Packed tight into the standard lumber wagons were the heavy iron plows, axes, cooking pots, and seed bags required to forge a life out of the deep timber. Every creak of the deck under the weight of their horses and cattle had been a reminder of what was at stake; to lose an animal to the river was to lose a piece of their future before they even set foot on Illinois soil. As they finally unloaded onto the bank, the wild, unbroken shoreline of Massac County rose up to meet them—a dense wall of oak, hickory, and cane that promised immense hardship and total freedom all at once.

The Labyrinth of the Cache

They didn't linger long at the river's edge. With the livestock hitched to the heavy lumber wagons and their worldly goods secured, John Epps turned his back on the Ohio and led his sons north. Before them lay a trek of roughly twelve to fifteen miles to reach the high safety of the New Columbia bluff. Though short in distance, it would prove to be a punishing two-day battle against the landscape itself.

The first day of the overland trek plunged the family directly into the notorious lowlands and cypress swamps of the Cache River basin. In the late 1840s, this area was a suffocating labyrinth of wild cane brakes, stagnant backwaters, and deep, alluvial mud. The heavily loaded wagons slowed to a crawling pace of barely one mile an hour. Every foot of progress had to be earned. Swarms of mosquitoes and biting flies plagued the men and livestock, bringing with them the constant frontier dread of "ague" and swamp fevers.

Moses and Nathaniel spent hours with felling axes in hand, hacking paths through dense cane and fallen logs just to clear a way for the iron-rimmed wheels. When the wagons inevitably sank into the mire, the brothers put their own shoulders to the water-logged timber, heaving alongside the straining horses to break the suction of the mud. By sundown on that first exhausting day, the family had covered barely seven miles, forcing them to make a rough, damp encampment right at the edge of the swampy bottomlands, exhausted but determined.

The second morning brought the most physically grueling trial of the journey: the steep, rocky ascent out of the basin. The terrain broke sharply upward toward the high ridge of the New Columbia bluff, which sat firmly within the northern tier of Massac County—a line newly drawn by the state legislature just a few years prior in 1843. To pull the heavy wagons up the rugged incline, the horses were strained to their absolute limits, their muscles bunching against the leather harnesses. Moses and Nathaniel walked the wheels, ready with chocks to lock the wagons in place whenever the teams needed to breathe.

Arriving on the New Columbia Bluff

It was late in the afternoon of that second day when they finally crested the ridge. The reward was instant: the heavy, humid air of the swamps gave way to a crisp breeze, and the ground became dry and solid underfoot. Towering hundreds of feet over the dangerous bottomlands, the bluff offered safety from the seasonal floods and a vantage point from which a man could look out over the vast, timbered country he intended to tame.

Standing on that high Massac County ridge as the late sun broke through the clouds, the exhaustion of the swamps began to lift. They had survived the river and conquered the mud of the Cache. Now, with the horses and cattle finally stepping onto firm, dry ground, the Comers dropped the heavy wooden wagon tongues, unhitched the weary teams, and looked out over the ridge. This was the high country where they would build their first shelter, strike their roots deep into the frontier dirt, and lay the absolute foundation for generations of Comers to come.