The Natchez Trace

The parkway begins, unassumingly, at Tennessee Highway 100, milepost 444, about seventeen miles southwest of downtown Nashville. The old Trace ran on into Nashville itself. Read more It ended there because the Cherokee refused the United States a road from Knoxville to Nashville, while the Chickasaw and Choctaw agreed in 1801 to one running south through their nations to Natchez.

In its working years a mail rider left Nashville every Saturday at eight in the evening and was due in Natchez ten days and four hours later. The parkway over it took far longer: signed into being on 18 May 1938, begun in 1939, and finished only on 21 May 2005.

The parkway's one piece of showing off, at milepost 438: 1,572 feet of concrete standing 145 feet over Birdsong Hollow on two hollow arches that meet at a single pier, with no spandrel columns holding the deck up at all. Read more It opened in 1994, the first segmentally built concrete arch bridge in the country, and took a Presidential Award for Design Excellence the following year.

The mileposts count up from Natchez, so heading south from here they count down at your shoulder, all the way to zero. The bridge and the parkway either side of it, mileposts 437 to 440, are closed to every kind of traffic from April 2026 until spring 2027 while a permanent pedestrian safety barrier goes on, with a signed detour of about seven and a half miles.

John and Dolly Gordon built this brick house in 1818 at the Duck River crossing, milepost 407.7, where they held 1,500 acres, a trading post, and the ferry that everyone going north had to use. Read more It is one of only two buildings still standing on the parkway from the years the Trace was a working road; the other is Mount Locust, 392 miles south. The outside has been put back to 1818, and a short path drops to the old ferry landing.

Nine hundred feet of paved path drops off the ridge at milepost 404.7 to a pool under a fall of about forty feet, on the seasonal Jackson Branch. Read more It exists because of a theft: Jackson Branch used to run quietly through a high valley of its own until the Duck River captured it, and the falls are the raw seam where the new channel cut down through the bluff. North of the Tennessee River the parkway rides the Highland Rim like a mountain road, all bluffs and hollows, and this is the waterfall everybody stops for. Walking down is nothing. Walking back up is the price.

Meriwether Lewis rode in to Grinder's Stand, at what is now milepost 385.9, on the evening of 10 October 1809, and died of gunshot wounds early the next morning: thirty-five years old, three years… Read more back from the Pacific, and on his way along the Trace to Washington. Whether he shot himself has been argued ever since, and his mother never accepted that he had.

Tennessee put a monument over the grave in 1848, a square limestone column carved deliberately as a broken shaft, to say that a career had been cut off rather than finished. One of the parkway's three free campgrounds is here.

Travelers crossed the Buffalo River here at milepost 382.8, where it was fordable except after heavy rain. Read more The name came from the stone riverbed, which reminded them of the metaled, stone-surfaced roads back home. The naturalist Alexander Wilson forded it with great difficulty in 1811.

A short trail follows the millrace that fed Steele's Iron Works in the 1820s, a charcoal-burning furnace that made crude pig iron; the race drove its air blast. A slag pile and the channel are all that remain.

When the road at milepost 350.5 got so waterlogged that wagons could not be pulled through, travelers simply cut a new path through the woods beside it. Read more Here you can see three of those detours side by side, each worn into the ground by oxcarts and wagons trying to get around the mud the last one sank into. The Park Service calls it an early interstate road-building venture; the travelers remembered snakes and mosquitoes.

It is not the better-known Sunken Trace, 309 miles south in Mississippi, which is a single channel worn deep into the loess. Two sites, one name.

George Colbert, a Chickasaw leader whose own name was Tootemastubbe, ran the ferry across the Tennessee River here, at milepost 327.3, from about 1800 to 1819, with a stand beside it for whoever… Read more was waiting on the weather. The story every guide repeats is that he charged Andrew Jackson $75,000 to move an army across. It is folklore; what survives in the accounts is a Creek War bill of $150 for ferrying 600 men and horses.

Colbert, who had led Chickasaw troops under Jackson in the Creek War, later signed the 1834 treaty that set his own nation's removal in motion, and died in Indian Territory in 1839. The river below is a wide impoundment now, and the parkway steps over it on a bridge.

A steep paved path of about 1,100 feet climbs from the parking area at milepost 317 to an overlook that the Encyclopedia of Alabama puts at about 800 feet, the highest point of the Trace in Alabama. Read more Taller trees have partly closed the view since it was built, but in autumn the color works across the ridges below, and from mid-March to mid-April the dogwoods are out along the climb. Benches on the way up are there for a reason.

A flat-topped mound at milepost 308.8, rebuilt by the Park Service to its estimated eight feet, raised somewhere between 1100 and 1300. Read more What excavation turned up was building material rather than burials, so something stood on top of it: a house for somebody who mattered, or a temple. It is the first site in Mississippi heading south, with the Alabama line a few hundred yards behind you.

Eight dome-shaped burial mounds spread over ninety acres at milepost 286.7, raised around 1 to 200 of the common era by Middle Woodland people of the Miller culture. Read more It is one of the largest sites of its age in the region, and a sizable village stood nearby.

In 1966 a Park Service archaeologist excavated four of the mounds and found fire pits, low clay platforms, burials (some cremated) and ceremonial goods: copper ear spools, a greenstone pipe, galena and mica, materials that had traveled from as far as the Great Lakes. The Chickasaw still regard the mounds as sacred. Eleven hundred years separate these mounds from Emerald Mound at the southern end of the road.

No buildings, only outlines on the ground and a short loop through ninety acres of blackland prairie inside modern Tupelo, at milepost 261.8. Read more The Chickasaw wintered in round houses with plastered walls and spent summers in long rectangular ones built to move air, and both footprints are marked out.

This was the Chickasaw Old Fields, the center of the nation whose permission the Trace needed before it was a road at all. The sections of the road that crossed the Chickasaw and Choctaw nations ran on treaties the United States negotiated, not on land it could simply take.

A spur road at milepost 193.1 climbs Little Mountain to an overlook at 603 feet, among the highest ground in Mississippi, which tells you as much about Mississippi as about the hill. Read more Below it sits one of the parkway's three campgrounds: free, primitive, first come first served.

The park is named for Thomas Jefferson Busby, the congressman who got the Old Trace surveyed in 1934, which is the reason any of this was built. Roosevelt signed the parkway into being in 1938, and it took until 2005 to open the last gaps.

Louis LeFleur set up a stand near here around 1812, and because of what he was the place got called French Camp and never shook it off. Read more His son took the name Greenwood Leflore, became a Choctaw chief and later a Mississippi state senator, and has a city and a county named after him.

The village at milepost 180.7 still runs the academy Presbyterian missionaries founded in 1885, a sorghum mill that fires up in October, and a cafe, which makes it one of the very few places on this road where lunch is possible.

A twenty-minute boardwalk loop at milepost 122, over an abandoned channel of the Pearl River, through water tupelo and bald cypress standing in still black water on trunks swollen at the base for footing. Read more Alligators live in it. Turtles and wading birds are the ones you will actually see. Nothing else on the parkway looks remotely like it, and it is worth the stop in the rain.

The United States kept an agent to the Choctaw Nation on the Trace, and at milepost 100.7 is one of the places the agency stood; the National Register dates it here to 1811 to 1823. Read more The agent checked travelers' passports, collected debts, saw that the Choctaw were paid for land they ceded, and taught farming. As each cession shrank the nation, the agency moved to stay inside its borders: four times in all.

One agent, Silas Dinsmoor (the Park Service spells it Dinsmore), once clashed with Andrew Jackson over passports. In 1820, at the Treaty of Doak's Stand, the Choctaw gave up about five million acres for thirteen million in the west, and in 1830 the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek took the rest.

In 1860 this was a town of 2,616 people, with about 2,000 enslaved people alongside them who were not counted as residents. Read more Then the war came through, then yellow fever in 1878, then the boll weevil, then the topsoil off the worn-out fields, and by 1930 the last store had closed and the spring the place was named for had stopped running.

The 1837 Methodist church at milepost 54.8 is the only building left; the rest is a loop walk past a cistern, a rusting safe and a cemetery. The southernmost of the parkway's three campgrounds is here.

For anyone heading north, this was where the wilderness began. The ford across Bayou Pierre at milepost 45.7 was the line between the Old Natchez District and the Choctaw Nation. Read more The traveler Francis Bailey reached it in 1797, about sixty miles out of Natchez, and wrote that from here they had to date their departure into the wilderness. A half-mile trail leads down to the Old Trace and the ford.

A short road south leads to Mangum Mound, a Plaquemine culture burial site built on a natural hill. The Park Service dates it to nearly 1,000 years ago; excavators put its burials between 1350 and 1500. They found copper plates engraved with a birdman.

A few hundred yards of the original road at milepost 41.5, worn so far down into the loess that you walk it between earth walls well over head height. Nothing was dug here. Read more During the ice ages the wind laid silt thirty to ninety feet deep across this part of Mississippi; it stands in vertical walls when dry and washes away under any traffic at all. Feet, hooves and wheels loosened it and the rain took it away, year after year, until the road was below the country it crossed. It is the shortest walk on the parkway to the oldest thing on it.

Begun about 1780, and the only one of more than fifty stands on the Old Trace still standing, at milepost 15.5. A Kaintuck walking home got a plate of corn mush and floor space for the night. Read more It was a working plantation as well as an inn: the grounds hold the Ferguson and Chamberlain family plot, the kiln where the bricks were made, and, on the west side, the cemetery of the forty-three enslaved people whose work the whole operation rested on.

The house is closed for structural repairs as of August 2026; the grounds and the walks are open.

Eight acres of flat top, thirty-five feet high, 770 feet by 435 at the base, and second in size among Mississippian earthworks only to Monks Mound at Cahokia. Read more It was raised and used between roughly 1250 and 1600 by Plaquemine people, ancestors of the Natchez, every basket of it carried by hand. You are allowed to walk up onto it, which is the whole point of coming. It is at milepost 10.3.

The parkway ends quietly at Liberty Road, milepost 0, but the Trace began down here, on the landing below the bluff. Read more Flatboatmen from Kentucky, Ohio and Tennessee floated their cargo down the Mississippi, sold it and the boat's lumber at Natchez or New Orleans, and, since a flatboat could not be rowed back upriver, walked home: about 450 miles, two to three weeks. By 1810 an estimated ten thousand made the walk each year. They were all Kaintucks, whatever state they came from.

Under-the-Hill was rough. In 1817 a mob of boatmen seized the landing, and three days of rioting ended only when officials aimed a cannon at them from the bluff. The steamboat ended all of it: by the 1820s a Kaintuck could ride home with his money in his pocket. Silver Street is still here, with a saloon facing the river.