Brashears Stand, at milepost 104.5 of the Natchez Trace Parkway in Ridgeland, was one of the first inns on the Natchez Trace at the edge of the Choctaw Nation. On December 2, 1806, Turner Brashears advertised in the Mississippi Herald at Natchez that he had opened a House of Entertainment in the Wilderness on the road to Nashville, about 40 miles from William Smith's stand, at the Indian Line, with provisions, feed and a blacksmith shop for travellers. He had come to the area in the late 1700s, traded with the Choctaw and learned their language. The Methodist preacher Jacob Young stopped in 1807 and found a fine public house whose keeper had an Indian wife, held many enslaved people, and knew how to make a high bill.
The stand came out of a bargain. The Choctaw agreed in 1805 to let inns be kept along the road, and when nobody would lease them, the agent Silas Dinsmoor offered the stands rent-free. Brashears worked at times as interpreter to the Choctaw Agency and once signed himself assistant agent, and when Dinsmoor was removed in 1813, Brashears served as acting agent. A list of agency employees gives his origin as Bladensburg, Maryland. According to the National Park Service, he grew wealthy selling land and enslaved people.
The stand became a landmark. When Congress funded the Robinson Road toward Columbus in 1821, the act named Turner Brashears' stand as its starting point, though the road as finally cut appears to have met the Trace farther north, near Doak's Stand. The inn appears in John Melish's traveller's directory for 1825 but not on Tanner's map of 1831.
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32.4249, -90.0885
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