Local Stories in Alabama
7 places
History·Colbert County
Colbert's Ferry
Colbert's Ferry carried the Natchez Trace across the Tennessee River from the early 1800s until 1819, and it belonged to a Chickasaw man, George Colbert. When the Chickasaw agreed in 1801 to let the United States open a wagon road through their country, they kept the ferries for the nation, and Colbert ran the ferry where the road met the river.
Military·Lauderdale County
Gravelly Springs
For two months in the winter of 1865 the spring at Gravelly Springs, in western Lauderdale County, anchored the camp of a Union cavalry corps tens of thousands strong. Major General James Harrison Wilson brought his corps to the spring in mid-January and kept it there until mid-March, spread out in camps from Gravelly Springs west toward Waterloo.
History·Colbert County
The Bear Creek Line
The Natchez Trace Parkway crosses between Alabama and Mississippi on a boundary drawn to a creek mouth that is now underwater. When Congress created the Alabama Territory on 3 March 1817, it set the western line up the Tennessee River to the mouth of Bear Creek, thence by a direct line to the northwest corner of Washington County, and thence due south to the Gulf.
History·Lauderdale County
The Cherokee Water Route
Three detachments of Cherokee removed from their homeland in 1838 went down the Tennessee River by boat past the point where the Natchez Trace Parkway now crosses on the John Coffee Memorial Bridge, and the Park Service marks the reach with its Trail of Tears Water Route Overlook on the north bank.
History·Lauderdale County
The Chickasaw Path
A short stretch of the original Natchez Trace survives near Threet, in Lauderdale County, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1976 as segment 310-2A. The nomination describes about 850 feet of it now paved as a county road and 400 feet left unpaved, before the old line gives way to Alabama Highway 20 and the parkway, where it is obliterated.
History·Lauderdale County
The Drane Detachment
In early July 1838 a forced column of Cherokee walked west along the line of Lauderdale County Road 14, the old Waterloo Road, which now crosses the Natchez Trace Parkway. They were the detachment of Captain G. S. Drane. Drought had left the Hiwassee and Tennessee rivers too low for the boats the removal was meant to use, so on 17 June the detachment set out on foot from the Chattanooga area, a march of about 250 miles to the river landing at Waterloo, Alabama, about ten miles west of the…
History·Lauderdale County
Wichahpi Stone Wall
The Wichahpi Commemorative Stone Wall is a dry-stacked wall about a mile long that Tom Hendrix built by hand on his own land beside Lauderdale County Road 8, a short way east of the Natchez Trace Parkway. Hendrix, who retired in 1983 when a Ford aluminum plant closed, raised it from some eight million pounds of sandstone and limestone, laid without mortar, four to six feet high and thirty feet across at its widest.