Chiwapa Creek passes under the Natchez Trace Parkway at about milepost 253.1 in southwestern Lee County, about a mile north of the Black Belt Overlook, on a floodplain more than a mile wide in the Demopolis Chalk country. In the 1940s it could run dry. Measured downstream at Shannon, where it drains 130 square miles, it carried no flow at all on August 26, 1943, and 5,950 cubic feet per second on February 14, 1950, according to Surface Waters of Mississippi, published by the Mississippi Geological Survey in 1950. Chiwapa flows east to Town Creek, which joins the Tombigbee River near Amory.
The rock explains the swing. A 1983 U.S. Geological Survey study of Coastal Plain streams found that basins underlain by clay or chalk have steep flow duration curves, with a low share of their discharge coming from groundwater as base flow, while basins on sand and gravel run steadier. Ten flood-control dams were later built in the Chiwapa watershed, so the creek's 1940s extremes may no longer hold.
Upstream the creek cuts down through most of the local rock column. A 1943 survey of Pontotoc County found blue-gray Selma chalk in its banks and bed, Ripley limestone along its south bank three miles southeast of Pontotoc, and, in test holes in its valley wall two miles south of Pontotoc, the contact between Cretaceous and Paleocene beds. One old variant of the creek's name is Pontotoc Creek.
Getting there
34.1654, -88.8116
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
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