Cayuga, a crossroads community on the Natchez Trace northeast of Rocky Springs, was Ulysses S. Grant's headquarters from May 10 to May 12, 1863, on the march that led to the siege of Vicksburg. Grant moved his headquarters up from Rocky Springs on May 10. On May 11, two divisions of Sherman's Fifteenth Corps marched through Cayuga to Auburn, three and a half miles northeast, while John McClernand's Thirteenth Corps held its camps at Cayuga and Fivemile Creek. From Cayuga, Grant pressed James B. McPherson to push on into Raymond, warning him that the army had to fight before its rations ran out.
Grant also notified Washington that it would no longer hear from him. He had crossed the Mississippi below Grand Gulf at the end of April and won at Port Gibson on May 1, and he was now moving three corps on parallel roads toward the railroad between Vicksburg and Jackson. McPherson's Seventeenth Corps, short of water, managed only a mile and a half on May 11, from the Weeks farm to the Roach farm. On the morning of May 12 Grant rode from Cayuga to join Sherman at Auburn, and that afternoon McPherson met the Confederates at Raymond.
Cayuga lay in what had been Choctaw country, just outside the old Natchez District, whose eastern boundary crosses the parkway two miles southwest at milepost 61.0. A post office named Cayuga opened in 1829 and closed in 1906, and the community once had two churches.
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32.1594, -90.6938
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