The Choctaw Agency site, at milepost 100.7 of the Natchez Trace Parkway in Ridgeland, is where the United States agent to the Choctaw Nation lived and worked from 1811 to 1823. In 1811 the agent, Silas Dinsmoor, moved the agency from near present-day Quitman to the Natchez road and built a large house, drawn as two stories on an 1821–22 survey map. The agent checked the passes of travellers crossing Choctaw land, paid annuities, approved inns and trading posts and served as postmaster. In 1815 the paid staff included two weaving instructors, two blacksmiths and a wheelwright and loom maker, most of them teaching Choctaw people at the agency.
In the winter of 1811–12 Andrew Jackson, bringing enslaved people north from Natchez without the passport Dinsmoor required for them, reached the agency armed and ready to force his way past. Dinsmoor was away, and Jackson went through. Jackson accused Dinsmoor of keeping a store and tavern and delaying travellers for profit, and his complaints to Washington are thought to have helped end Dinsmoor's time as agent in 1813. John McKee took over the house in 1815 and William Ward followed. After the Treaty of Doak's Stand in 1820 the site was no longer in Choctaw territory, and in 1823 the agency moved to the Robinson Road.
In 1988 the archeologist Jim Atkinson found a wall of yellow-tan brick 58 centimetres below the surface, with 202 cut nails and Choctaw pottery in every level. A 1994 Mississippi State University dig cleared the cellar, 20 by 9 feet, and an unlined cistern 15 feet wide and 12 deep. The site is listed on the National Register with 3.3 miles of Old Agency Road, the old Trace.
Getting there
32.4288, -90.1512
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
Hear it from the road
Whistlestop is an audio tour guide app that tells you this story automatically when you drive past. No searching, no tapping, nothing to ask.
