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. The same document lists the road's older names, among them the Path to the Chickasaw Nation and the Path to the Choctaw Nation, and notes that the southern part appears on British maps of the 1770s.
The road through Lauderdale County ran across Chickasaw land, and it was opened on Chickasaw terms. In the treaty signed at Chickasaw Bluffs on 24 October 1801, the nation gave the United States leave to lay out and make a convenient wagon road through its country, on the condition that the necessary ferries over the watercourses would be the property of the Chickasaw nation. Under that clause the crossing of the Tennessee was Chickasaw business, and George Colbert, who signed the treaty, ran the ferry there, about eight miles south-west. The road was improved between 1801 and 1807 and carried the mail from 1800 into the 1830s. The Chickasaw gave up their land north of the Tennessee in 1816, and the Natchez Trace Parkway was created in 1938.
Getting there
34.9253, -87.8439
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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