Bethel Mission

Bethel, a mission station of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, stood about half a mile northwest of milepost 176.3 of the Natchez Trace Parkway, in what was then the Choctaw Nation. Its name means house of God, and it opened in 1822 as one of thirteen Choctaw mission stations, according to the National Park Service. Indian, enslaved and other workmen labored for four weeks, often until ten at night by the light of the moon or of large fires, to clear the forest and raise the buildings. The missionaries taught Choctaw and other children farming, carpentry, weaving and housekeeping alongside reading, writing and arithmetic.

The board had opened its first Choctaw school at Elliot on the Yalobusha River in 1818, paid for partly by $6,000 a year that the Choctaws set aside from their own annuity for sixteen years. The Choctaw wanted schools near their homes, and in 1822, the historian Clara Sue Kidwell writes, Loring S. Williams went to French Camps, the largely mixed-blood settlement around the LeFlore family's trading post on the Natchez road, to establish the station that became Bethel. Leaders such as Greenwood LeFlore backed the schools, but by 1827 the board's superintendent conceded that they stood low in the nation's esteem.

In June 1828 Zeddock Brashears charged that Stephen McComber, the teacher at Bethel, had made his granddaughter, Susan Lyle, pregnant. McComber admitted it and was removed from the station, and LeFlore demanded a payment to her family. The Park Service marker dates Bethel's closing to 1826, but the school was still running in 1828; the board told Congress in 1832 that it closed because the Choctaws had moved away from it.