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. He kept a stand on the ridge above it, giving travellers food and lodging; one of them, Jose Bernardo Gutierrez de Lara, called it a country place, with an abundance of glass in its windows and doors. Colbert's plantation nearby depended on the labour of 150 enslaved people.
Colbert, born about 1764, the son of a Scottish trader, had met George Washington in 1794 and John Adams in 1798. When the Chickasaw ceded their land north of the Tennessee in 1816, the treaty reserved a tract on the north bank for him and his heirs. The river at the crossing is now Pickwick Lake, filled when the Tennessee Valley Authority completed Pickwick Landing Dam in 1938.
The parkway's bridge beside the ferry site has been named for John Coffee, Andrew Jackson's business partner and one of his generals. In 1832 Coffee was the sole United States commissioner for the Treaty of Pontotoc Creek, in which the Chickasaw gave up all their land east of the Mississippi. George and Levi Colbert both signed it. George went west with his people and died in Indian Territory in 1839.
Getting there
34.8379, -87.9420
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
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