Folsom's Stand

Folsom's stand stood at Pigeon Roost, in Choctaw County, near the point where the old Natchez Trace crossed Pigeon Roost Creek, which the Park Service places about a mile east of the Natchez Trace Parkway's Pigeon Roost stop. The National Park Service says Nathaniel Folsom and his Choctaw wife kept a trading post there before 1790 and that their son David later ran it and took in travellers. The Reverend Thomas Nixon, who stopped in 1815, recorded that David's wife prepared suitable nourishment and would have no pay. The creek's name, the Park Service says, recalls the millions of passenger pigeons that once roosted in the trees along it. David Folsom was born in 1791, one of 24 children. He learned English as a boy while living with his sister and her husband, a United States Indian agent, came home to work at his father's tavern and trading post, and at sixteen rode 250 miles to a school on the Elk River in Tennessee.

He served three years under Andrew Jackson and Pushmataha in the wars of 1812 to 1814, rising to colonel. He backed the mission schools the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions opened among the Choctaw, Elliot in 1818 and Mayhew in 1820, and his home at Pigeon Roost lay between them.

He opposed removal, and in 1826 he became chief of the Northeast District in place of Mushulatubbee. He also held ten enslaved people. In 1830 he signed the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, and was scorned for it. He went west with the Choctaw and died at Doaksville in 1847.