Dean Stand

Dean Stand was a frontier farm and inn kept by William and Margaret Dean, who settled on the Old Natchez Trace near milepost 73.5 of the parkway around 1823, three years after the Treaty of Doak's Stand opened the surrounding Choctaw lands to white settlement. The Deans added to their farm income by lodging travelers: boatmen walking home from downriver, mail riders, traders in land and horses, itinerant preachers and the occasional fugitive. By 1863 the place was known as the Dillon plantation, and on the night of May 12 of that year, according to the National Park Service, Ulysses S. Grant made his headquarters there after the Battle of Raymond.

Grant's three corps had spent that day moving north on parallel roads toward the railroad between Vicksburg and Jackson. William T. Sherman's corps forced a crossing of Fourteenmile Creek near the Dillon place, and Grant rode with Sherman. Outside Raymond, about three miles east of the parkway at milepost 78.3, James B. McPherson's corps fought the Confederate brigade of John Gregg and drove it toward Jackson. Grant's memoirs count 66 Union dead and 339 wounded at Raymond, and 6 dead and 24 wounded at the Fourteenmile Creek crossings.

News of McPherson's victory reached Grant about sundown. He wrote that he decided at once to turn the whole army toward Jackson and to cut loose from his supply line altogether, so that he could destroy the Confederate force gathering there before turning back on John C. Pemberton at Vicksburg. That night McPherson was ordered to march on Clinton at daylight, and Sherman and John McClernand to follow by way of Raymond. Jackson fell two days later.