Confederate General Leonidas Polk fortified the area now occupied by the park beginning September 3, 1861. The fort at Columbus was built upon a bluff along the cutside of the river. The fort was christened Fort DeRussey, but Polk referred it as the Gibraltar of the West. He had equipped it with a massive chain that was stretched across the Mississippi to Belmont, Missouri, to block the passage of Union gunboats and supply vessels to and from Southern destinations in the western theaters of the war.[1] Equipped also with 143 cannons, Columbus was the Northern-most Confederate base along the Mississippi, protecting Memphis, Vicksburg and other key Southern holdings. As the northern terminus of the Mobile and Ohio Railroad, Columbus was logistically tied to Confederate supply lines. The primary attraction in the park continues to be Polk's giant chain, which is estimated to have been over a mile long before flooding and erosion destroyed part of it. With an anchor weighing between four and six tons and each chain link being eleven inches long, the Civilian Conservation Corps built a stone monument to hold the chain in 1934