In 1718, French explorers established Fort St. Pierre on a bluff over looking the Yazoo River.

Now, 299 years later, an eight-member commission of local residents is planning a series of events to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the fort’s establishment.

“The purpose of the planning commission is to decide on what kind of events are appropriate for celebrating the 300th anniversary in 2018,” said Frederick L. Briuer, a retired research archeologist with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Engineer Research and Development Center and chairman of the Fort St. Pierre Tercentenary Planning Commission.

He said the committee’s first meeting was Wednesday.

The observance is the second time local residents have remembered the fort. A plaque commemorating Fort St. Pierre as a National Historic Landmark was dedicated on the lawn of the Old Court House Museum in 2001.

Built on a site near Mississippi 3, north of the Redwood community, Fort St. Pierre and Fort Rosalie in Natchez were built to deter English traders from moving in the Lower Mississippi Valley and challenging the French sphere of influence.

St. Pierre was occupied for 11 years before an uprising among members of the Natchez tribe in 1729 attacked both St. Pierre and Rosalie, massacring the inhabitants of both forts and burning them to the ground.

Briuer said Fort St. Pierre is remembered at the site where it was established.

“There’s a wonderful triptych bronze and stone monument that was cast in 1928 and stood at the St. Peter bridge until the St. Peter bridge was torn down in the mid-60s, and the Colonial Dames had it moved over to the Mississippi Department of Transportation property where Fort St. Pierre stood,” he said.

“It’s a beautiful monument, and it’s also a magnificent view watershed of the Yazoo River Yazoo flood plain to the west, just as the French and the Indians would have seen it. Two Ph.D. dissertations have been written by archeologists about the site.”

Briuer said previous excavations at the site have found “all kinds of stuff; literally thousands of artifacts were uncovered, and they found all four bastions, two gates, the moat, and a dozen different buildings, so it’s a remarkable archeological resource and yet only 50 percent of the inside of the fort has been excavated.”

“It has tremendous future historical and archeological potential.”

He said artifacts found at the site were being kept at the University of Alabama and will be returned to be stored at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History in Jackson.