Fort Assumption (Memphis, Shelby County, Tennessee)

Memphis, Shelby County · Tennessee · Chickasaw Wars

Quick BriefFort Assumption was a French fortification constructed in 1739 on the fourth Chickasaw Bluff on the Mississippi River in present-day Memphis, Tennessee. The fort served as a base against the Chickasaw in the unsuccessful Indian-removal Campaign of 1739. The French garrison was withdrawn and the fortification abandoned on March 31, 1740.

History & Significance

Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville led an army of 1,200 Frenchmen with roughly 2,400 black and Native soldiers into the area to eradicate the Chickasaw Indians and secure the land for French settlement. The fort was positioned on high ground overlooking the Mississippi River and completed on August 15, 1739, the day of the Feast of the Assumption, giving it its name.

During the winter of 1739–40 the garrison suffered from weather, disease, desertion, and drunkenness before being withdrawn on March 31, 1740. Although French occupation lasted only a few months, France claimed the area for eighty years.

Bienville's activity there marked the first recorded European presence on the land that Memphis occupies today and was the first European structure built in what is now Shelby County and the third in all of Tennessee. The fort may have been constructed on or near the earlier French Fort Prudhomme, built by La Salle's expedition in 1682.