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. From the 35th parallel the line follows the Tennessee about nine miles to the mouth of Bear Creek, submerged since the 1930s under Pickwick Lake.
The southern end of the line moved before it was settled. In 1819 and 1820 it was shifted so that the settlers along the Pascagoula River stayed in Mississippi, and the end point, ten miles east of the river's mouth, was agreed in May 1820. Alabama became a state on 14 December 1819, while the land on both sides of the line at the parkway was still Chickasaw country, not given up until the cession of 1832. The Encyclopedia of Alabama suggests that the line's northern course was apparently shaped by sales to two Georgia land companies, the Tennessee Yazoo Company of 1789 and the Tennessee Company of 1795.
Getting there
34.6451, -88.1302
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
Hear it from the road
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