A Tour through the New Madrid Seismic Zone

If traffic permits (it will), and leaves do not obstruct the view, stop on the overpass of I-55 and study the expanse of flat horizon to the south. You can see the curvature of the earth. The Ohio river flowed from left to right at the bottom of the hill.

You'll quickly drop to the bottom of the hill and drive alongside hills to the north and flatland to the south. You are driving on top of the Commerce Lineament, a seismic oddity that runs in a nearly straight line from Indiana to Arkansas. In past eras, it has seen serious quake activity, that churned soils of different eras into a big mixing bowl which is the hill. Scientists hired someone to cut trenches in that hill, and studied the heavily churned cross section of soils. Sonar-type soundings confirm a big crack beneath your road.

Seismic activity here 10,000 years ago probably helped the river break through the "Thebes gap", which allows the Mississippi to make a sharp EAST bend from Cape, then to Cairo. Before that, the OHIO River [that's the OHIO river] was flowing where you are driving. It turned south near the Benton exit of I-55, and merged with the nearby Mississippi waters, near Marked Tree, Ar. The Ohio's path across Southern Illinois was just south of State Route 146. Find Karnak and Tamms. Geologists suspect a large New Madrid quake in 900 AD dropped the ground between these towns. It filled back in, but the soil is different than in surrounding areas.

Once you get to the River Ridge winery, you can walk out (3/4 mile) to look down on the river from the top of the gap, though the view is partially obstructed by trees. The village of Commerce has no levee, and has a marker of how Lewis and Clark found the Tywappity Bottoms here. Back at I-55, Diebold Orchard sells fruit, apple cider, at the Benton exit.

Sgt. John Ordway, best journal-keeper of the Lewis and Clark expedition, returned to the Tywappity Bottom area and New Madrid, where he prospered by quickly owning apple and peach plantations, until the big quakes, which left him destitute.

A 1990 quake, a couple months before the Iben Browning media frenzy, was centered at New Hamburg, a little town just west, and along the Commerce lineament. If you visit it, you can probably eat very homestyle good food in the back of a local grocery. Say hi to the couple who've run it for 40 years. A tavern across the street is regionally famous for good food. A bed and breakfast is at the end of town, with a pretty lake. The town of Kelso, just up the road, has a steak restaurant in an old bank, beside a beautiful Catholic church. Both towns are just north of Benton on US 61.

Benton Hill: From the top of the "Benton Hill" of I-55, it seems you can see all the way to New Orleans across the flatland. This is the northern beginning of the New Madrid Seismic Zone. Note that the road actually dips a bit at the bottom of the hill, then comes back up, at the exit. This dip probably happened during the quakes. An elliptical sand boil of several hundred feet is a bit east. In the last 30 years, paleoseismologists have gotten serious about digging into the sand boils across the NMSZ. They've found shakes dating back to 2000, even 4000 BC and further, even though the river has washed away much of the evidence.

Side trip: You can drive from the east side of the Benton exit, (or south from Commerce) to Charleston, Mo., across flat farmland. An 1895 magnitude 6.7 quake was centered out here, a few miles north of Charleston and opposite Cairo IL and "Dogtooth Bend" of the Illinois side. But... there's nothing recognizably earthquake-related, to see. This quake shook down buildings in Sikeston and messed up the top of the Cairo library, but did not claim any lives. We're overdue for another 6+ quake, which this time would very likely claim some lives. Remember, a 6.7 magnitude is twice as strong as a 6.5. Many scientists now believe the big ones of 1811-12 were high 6's to perhaps high 7's, probably not 8's.

Grab an eye-level view of the river at Commerce. A Lewis & Clark marker tells of friendly indians near here who wanted to trade for the expedition's dog mascot. River views between here and Cairo are hard to find. In 1800, this side of the river was Spanish territory, with French, British and US forces all gathered nearby, wondering the outcome. Then Napoleon needed money and sold off the Louisiana Territory while Lewis and Clark were wintering opposite St. Louis. If New Madrid hadn't had its shakes, it may have become larger than St. Louis.

The multi-story Cairo Custom House Museum, city library across the street, and nearby Magnolia Manor, are well worth a visit for Civil War era buffs. Cairo's dining isn't elegant, but very tasty. At the confluence of the nation's two largest rivers, you can camp (Cairo city park) (if the water isn't up) with riverboats passing at eye level on either side. Tie this trip to Wickliffe, Ky., Columbus-Belmont park and the ferry, further down this page, and even Reelfoot Lake.

Between Cairo and Cape Girardeau on the Illinois side ... along Illinois 3 just north of Thebes, is a scenic overview of the river making a 90 degree bend.

Pull off about where the large power line crosses, and admire. This is the "Thebes gap" probably made 10,000 years ago by shaking on the Commerce Lineament. Before that, the river did not pass here (see above). Just south is a small tourist pulloff and walkway to the river. Then take the small side road in to Thebes. See the dual-track rail bridge built in 1905, still handling lots of rail traffic between Dallas and Chicago. Perhaps 35 crossings per day. It was built to handle the new motor cars, as well, but that part was never added. The use of concrete pillars was new and questionable when built, but has stood the test of time and made it to be considered the strongest bridge on the Mississippi. Many runaway barges have struck a bridge pillar over the years with no damage to the sturdy structure.

On the hill overlooking is an old stone courthouse where some say Lincoln tried a case or maybe just visited here, and runaway slave Dred Scott may have spent a night in the basement. Open by appointment only. Call southernmostillinois.com.

A small road runs under the Thebes bridge, and along the river. Closed during high water. A clearing a mile or so south is where archeologists have investigated a settlement 9400 years before present. It's one of the first vestiges of civilization in North America, with "Dalton tools", meaningful to archeologists. The river was shallow in this five mile stretch of Thebes gap. Ancient folks could likely walk across on pitted limestone during low water. Young Mark Twain was a riverboat pilot whose boat was crippled here by hitting rocks, and barely made it to Cairo.

Olive Branch has a good local homestyle restaurant on the highway (row of windows in the front). Just down the road is Horseshoe Lake, an "oxbow" lake probably made by the evolution of the Mississippi River. Known for fishing, camping. Lewis & Clark spent a night at the south end.

At Mound City (on the Ohio River, a bit east) is a Civil War national military cemetery. Mound City was a staging area for the north to fight the war. Boats were built and repaired on the drydock rails. It could handle 20-25 boats at once. It had a large stationary hospital (where the grain bins are, now) and a floating hospital which cared for and buried troops of blue and grey, black and white. The first Navy nurses were here, local midwives who could deal with seeing blood. More info from Cairo Custom House guides.

Side trip: The Stars and Stripes Military Museum is just south of Bloomfield, half an hour west. It and its military cemetery are relatively brand new, well-kept, and the museum is targeting a big expansion. Bloomfield is on part of Crowley's Ridge (running north-south). We have maps of it on this website. You can't read much about New Madrid Fault without reading about Crowley's ridge. Dexter restaurants are famous for their ribs.

Plutons:
Look at the road map again. Find Bloomfield, and visualize it in the middle of a 25-mile circle. We have several maps on this website of plutons along the New Madrid Seismic Zone. The largest one is the Bloomfield pluton. Basically, a pluton is lava that found its way up through the earth's crust because of seismic cracks. The lava type material usually never came completely to the surface, but adds to seismic instability because it weighs down the ground. None of it is visible here. See pictures of the Devil's Tower pluton in Wyoming, exposed by erosion, to visualize what we're talking about.

Sikeston: Stop by the depot museum downtown, and eat at the famous Lambert's Throwed Rolls Cafe. The municipal power plant is northwest of town off Salcedo Road. There are sand boils very near, even partially under it. Read a link on this website to author Sam Penny's version of how Sikeston would shake during a 7.9 quake. In spring, see Charleston's beautiful azelas.

Back to I-55, south toward New Madrid. Look for spots of noticeably whiter soil. These may well be sand boils. The interstate seems to dart around some swampy places.

New Madrid observation deck
Exit at New Madrid. Find the museum, on the levee at the end of the main street. Remember that the entire town sank 12 feet during the Feb. 7, 1812 quake, where nearby sections of land rose as much as 30 feet. After having an earthquake burger (top bun split in the middle), find the observation deck on the Mississippi.

The original site of New Madrid is now halfway out into the river. We are standing at the top of the big loop on your map, with river flowing from left to right. This loop was once called Bessie's Bend. A little town of Bessie was in the neck of the bend. Boat travelers would spend the night in the hotel, exiting the boat on the eastern shore. Then they would board the next morning on the western side, less than a mile away, but the boat had gone twenty miles around the bend, saving them some time.

Mark Twain wrote of an interesting feud on Kentucky Bend, or Bessie's Bend. A church was built exactly on the Tennessee-Kentucky line in the middle of that loop. A serious feud between two families continued for years. Members from both families would take their places for Sunday morning worship, one on the Kentucky side of the building, the other on the Tennessee side. When they bowed in prayer, those nearest the isle, with guns, kept their eyes open and watched the other side, for protection. See Wikipedia "Kentucky Bend". If you're on the Tennessee side, the church cemetery, with sign, is just north of where Bessie is noted on map above.

28 boats lost over the falls
Back to the New Madrid observation deck. To the right, six miles down river, are smokestacks from a power plant and aluminum plant. Those smokestacks and the Marston Rest Area of I-55 mark the approximate center of the largest earthquake ever to hit the continental US (Feb. 7, 1812). To the left, the earth to the south and west had pushed up several feet, and caused a waterfall. This diagonal "push" crossed the river's bends THREE times.

Even though the water ran backward for only a few hours, author David Stewart says the falls here lasted for a few days. Flatboats were the norm, almost helpless to quickly maneuver. Stewart says 28 of 30 boats capsized and were swamped, with almost total loss of life. Witnesses from where you are standing could hear frantic screams of the boatmen (a couple miles to the left, SE, but upriver. Another, lesser dam and waterfall were just downstream (to the right), and may not have lasted as long. The second dam was less than a kilometer to the right from where you are standing. See maps on this site showing Reelfoot Fault creating the Reelfoot Lake dam, and jaggedly crossing the top part of the loop.

Also in New Madrid (walking distance): Higgerson School is a one-room school, moved to downtown, with original furniture. Hours may vary. The Hunter-Dawson house is a one-block state park, magnificent southern mansion, a few blocks north of downtown. Museum on levee has several things to see, with nominal admission.

Civil War Side trip: Drive a bit out state route WW, ENE of New Madrid. You'll be on a levee road, seeing a fairly well-drained bayou (low marshy area). At first glance, it's very boring. Visualize crews from several civil war Union gunboats, waiting on the river just east for permission to run the blockade of Island #10 in the south bend of the river loops. While waiting, they cut a canal across this section to bypass the blockade and get supplies to other Union forces. Some of this bayou area is still wooded, as it was then. Read more civil war activity on this website.

There are elaborate valves in place just out this road to control the drainage of the bayou into the Mississippi. There is an ongoing court battle on whether this (large) area can be used as Mississippi River overflow during flooding. Local farmers' interests are on one side, versus interests for many miles along the river.

2011 spring-summer / The Ohio and Mississippi Rivers flooded at the same time, threatening levees at Cairo and other places. The Corps of Engineers exercised their option to "blow" a levee opposite Cairo to relieve stress on the levee system. A triangle-shaped piece of land from Cairo to New Madrid was flooded, covered with sand. Politicians fretted. Roads and bridges were ruined. Since 1929 it was understood that this MIGHT happen. About 100 homes, mostly lower income, were lost. $85 Million of single year crop damage. Search Birds Point New Madrid Floodway.

From the New Madrid river overlook marker:

...constructing a canal 50 feet wide and 12 miles long, 6 of those miles were cut through heavy timber where every tree had to be sawed off 4 1/2 feet below water. This remarkable feat was accomplished in 19 days.

As the canal was finished, they also ran the blockade and took control of this section of river.

Read from the Enigma paper, done by expert Eugene Schweig and others in 1996.

The Ohio River ice jam broke up at Louisville falls about the time of {the January quake). [Nolte (1854) reports that earthquakes "loosened the ice"], and many boats that began the trip to New Orleans at the falls had reached New Madrid and tied up for the night of 6 February 1812.

At 03:45 on 7 February the main dip-slip event of the entire sequence began. It created one waterfall or rapids and two flow barriers on the Mississippi River's Kentucky bend; an additional falls may have formed on the bend's western limb by deformation in the hanging wall.

The hanging wall rose beneath the river from 12 km to 17 km upstream of New Madrid. This created an uplift that obstructed flow near island #10 [bottom of the first river loop] and a downdrop falls or rapids downstream of the island [the 2:00-3:00 position of the river loop]. This combination was the most severe river disruption; it generated the great upstream wave and retrograde current so graphically described by Speed (1812) and the "patron" (Shatler 1815). Both travelers' flatboats would survive being swept over the downstream falls.

The second intersection of Reelfoot Fault with the river was immediately downstream of the town New Madrid (within 1 km). It uplifted the riverbed by one-to-several meters, accounting for the large wave and retrograde current at New Madrid, independently described by Bryan (1848) and Nolte (1854).

Big Lake, west of Blytheville, was formed in 1811-12. It handles overflow storm water from the entire Bootheel. The Bootheel drained pretty well before then 1811-12 quakes. Then millions of dollars of drainage work in the early 20th century again made many acres of farmland valuable.

Chickasaw Bluffs - eastern side of the Mississippi River
Bluffs line most of the river between Hickman, Ky., and Memphis. See Wikipedia for location of the four bluffs. Memphis is on the "fourth Chickasaw Bluff". Chickasaws did not hand over their land until after the 1811-12 quakes. The quakes caused landslides at various places. Once a landslide starts, the spot is never completely "healed" from further potential damage.

Just south of Wickliffe, Ky (opposite Cairo, IL) is a landslide bluff overlooking the river. It's where George Rogers Clark built Fort Jefferson, to watch over the new territory he had claimed for the Commonwealth of Virginia, and its governor, Thomas Jefferson. His brother William Clark (Lewis & Clark) stopped by to check on the abandoned site as they passed Cairo in 1803, a decade before the big shakes. Clark later was territorial Governor, and made the first-ever application for federal aid for New Madrid quake victims. Columbus, Ky, has had serious bluff landslide problems which threaten homes. The government recently stepped in and managed to slow the process.

Columbus Belmont Park
Control of the Mississippi River was strategic to winning the Civil War, in the early 1860s. Confederate forces thought they were entrenched high on a very scenic bluff overlooking the river at Columbus, Ky. They tried to block the river with a huge chain, which broke and sank under its own weight. The "rebs" also had a camp at Belmont, Missouri, on flatland just across the river. General Grant was stationed at Cairo, IL, brought some troops, burned the Belmont camp and cut supplies to the "rebs" up on the hill, and fairly easily cleared out the problem. The park is a beautiful place to visit, or camp for a few days. It has literal trenches the troops used, and a restored building museum that was used as a hospital.

Hickman Dorena Ferry
Has reopened after Birds Point New Madrid Floodway was flooded Apr-June 2011.
Operates across the Mississippi between a remote area near East Prairie MO, and Hickman, Ky. Your wait is likely less than half an hour. $14 per car. See the "Big Oak Tree State Park", nearby on the Missouri side. Check to be sure the ferry is operating. Visit the "tour de corn" in June, and bring your bike. An East Prairie restaurant installed a train whistle on its roof for nostalgia after the train tracks left. They'll sound it for you. The Towosahgy State Historic Site is on county road 502 SSE of East Prairie, indian mounds of 1000 years ago. Ask the Big Oak Tree park folks for more info. Lilbourn Fortified Village, just west of Interstate 55 at Exit #44, (the lower New Madrid exit) is another large mound.

Gold in them thar plutons
A uranium mining company has been looking for uranium near Charleston. Uranium is created 4-6 ways in nature, and changes in magma (lava) can cause it. However, the search was put on hold (May 09) because the prices dropped.

Big quakes were on three days
The 1811-12 sequence had a few thousand smaller quakes over 4-6 months. The largest ones were on three days, one in December, one in January and one in February. The December day had three big quakes each a few hours apart. Some researchers count one or two of those as aftershocks, which is why you may get confused reading how many "big" ones there were.

A form of earthquake lightning is seen around strong earthquakes. Look up "earthquake lights" on Wikipedia. Experts have five theories on what causes it. Traveler William Leigh Pierce on the Mississippi, two weeks before the first New Madrid big quake, said, "one half hour before sun-rise, two vast electrical columns shot up from the eastern horizon, until their heads reached the zenith." Such lights were seen in Savannah, Georgia, at the same time those folks felt the first NM quake.

Look at a US map. At Owensboro, Ky., west of Louisville, the first steamboat was docked for the night when the first NM jolt felt like the boat suddenly grounded. That was 215 miles from the epicenter. At Knoxville and Savannah, it rattled the china, even felt like being on a boat in rough seas. In the Mississippi valley, people said the soil rose and fell in 2-3 foot waves, behaving exactly like ocean waves. Few settlers were in the New Madrid region yet, and virtually none, further west of the Mississippi. Read eyewitness accounts.

We'd love to give you links to everything mentioned above... but this page would turn into one massive page of links.

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