On a trip back to Kentucky last week I got to take a two day road trip with my aunt and uncle, primarily to visit Cairo, Illinois. People who know Cairo may find that last clause surprising. It’s not exactly a tourist Mecca. At least there’s no border crossing to get there. One time years ago I stayed with a friend in Duluth, Minnesota, and when he had to work for a couple of days I took a side trip up to Thunder Bay, Ontario for no better reason than its name: Thunder Bay! It sounds like such a fun place, but the name is a lie. As far as I could tell, the city was just a series of strip malls loosely stapled to a two block downtown whose most striking feature was “the world’s largest building designed by a Ukrainian architect.” (I’m relying on memory for that last detail, but if it’s wrong, I assure you that the real answer was comparably weird.) The place was so down and out that merely wanting to go there got me in trouble. Crossing over the border both ways I was asked why I was visiting Thunder Bay, and when I said, “Tourism” I received funny looks and had my car searched for drugs. The border patrol apparently had a policy that no one in their right mind would go to Thunder Bay without an ulterior and illicit motive.

They’d probably think the same thing about Cairo, but fortunately there were no guards on either bridge linking the bottom tip of Illinois to Kentucky over the Ohio River or to Missouri over the Mississippi. In fact, there were scarcely any people at all. I should have known this – I had read that Cairo’s population had dropped from a peak of just over 15,000 in the 1920s to under 3000 today, and I had seen the sad pictures of the decrepit buildings in the old downtown that looked like little more than habit was keeping them upright. What I didn’t realize was that for whole blocks the buildings that weren’t falling down were already fallen. The old avenues by the Ohio levee where saloons and mills bustled around the time of the Civil War hadn’t taken the ghost town turn I expected, but instead had just disintegrated. If you hadn’t known a city had been there, you wouldn’t have guessed it. Much of the scene more closely resembled a quarry than a downtown.

Cities come and cities go, like everything else. The visit saddened me, though, because Cairo was important once, and there’s scarcely any sign left to remember that. Later on the day we saw Cairo we stopped at the Jefferson Davis monument, a 351 foot phallic symbol rising out of the flat lands of southwestern Kentucky, and a stunning reminder of the vast effort the losing side in the Civil War put into memorializing the conflict’s landscape. I can’t help thinking of the quip that we should have put Aaron Burr on the $10 bill instead of Alexander Hamilton, since after all, Burr won the duel. Cairo was the first seat of Union success in the war and there’s virtually nothing there to make that known. The city has been thoroughly Burr-ed.

Check out a map. Cairo hangs there at the very bottom of Illinois, dangling like a stray piece of free soil that the mighty rivers swirling around it could break off at any moment and amalgamate with the slave-holding lands to the south, east, and west. The city is lower in latitude than the Confederate capitol in Richmond, Virginia, and the attitudes of its inhabitants when Fort Sumter was fired upon were scarcely more favorable to a Lincoln-led Union than that geography would suggest. But the Union arrived there in the form of Grant and his army, and from that base they and Admiral Porter’s gunboats made the Mississippi, Tennessee, and Cumberland rivers grand avenues of invasion for subduing the rebel states in the west. While the fighting in Virginia amounted to nearly four years of stalemate the Union steadily ran over the west, and no site was more important to that effort than Cairo. Yet even the park marking the point just south of the city where Grant’s Fort Defiance once stood hardly deserves the name, being little more than one good rain from counting as a swamp.

It’s not as if the victors in the Civil War set up no monuments. Lincoln’s on the capitol mall certainly counts. But still it seems that winning produced less of a desire for memorials than losing did. Perhaps the Union side’s comparative lack of enthusiasm for the war after it was over helps explain why Cairo slowly faded away. Or maybe what we saw last week is just Cairo’s natural state. I don’t wish that to be so, but there’s historical evidence to support the claim. From the earliest European exploration in the area, settlers took it for granted that some great city should rise at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, but repeated failures kept destroying that assumption. Only the Civil War finally produced the investment in infrastructure that made Cairo reasonably large and prosperous, and as the decades wore on and that infrastructure wore out, nobody renewed it, and the prosperity and population departed. Much as Wagner’s music is better than it sounds, Cairo seems a better site for a city than it actually is. Charles Dickens wasn’t fooled. Here’s his description from 1842:

 A dismal swamp, on which the half-built houses rot away: cleared here and there for the space of a few yards; and teeming, then, with rank unwholesome vegetation, in whose baleful shade the wretched wanderers who are tempted hither, droop, and die, and lay their bones; the hateful Mississippi circling and eddying before it, and turning off upon its southern course a slimy monster hideous to behold; a hotbed of disease, an ugly sepulchre, a grave uncheered by any gleam of promise: a place without one single quality, in earth or air or water, to commend it: such is this dismal Cairo.

That’s not going on the brochures. But that’s just as well. We couldn’t find any brochures anyway.