Thirteen Confederate soldiers are buried beside a surviving stretch of the Old Natchez Trace at milepost 269.4 of the Natchez Trace Parkway, north of Tupelo in Lee County, and their names are lost. The National Park Service says several soldiers died at the spot during the Civil War, that no one is sure how, and that time erased their names from the original headstones. Tradition holds that they marched and camped along this part of the old road, much of which had been abandoned by the time the war began. A paved walk of about 700 feet leads from the parkway to the thirteen graves and a short section of the original Trace.
The Park Service sign at the graves offers three possibilities. They may have been wounded from Shiloh who retreated to the spot in 1862, the spring the Confederate army abandoned Corinth and fell back to Tupelo. They may have ridden with Nathan Bedford Forrest, who passed through in 1864. Or they may have been guarding the Tupelo headquarters of John Bell Hood's Army of Tennessee, which retreated to Tupelo after its defeat at Nashville in December 1864. The sign suggests they died of wounds, or of the hunger, poverty and sickness of the army camps.
The headstones face backwards, toward the old road, so that travellers on the Trace could read them. Whatever the first markers said disappeared long ago. In 1940 Senator Theodore Bilbo arranged for marble headstones, and they were stolen; the stones now in place were set by the National Park Service.
Getting there
34.3663, -88.6743
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