Grindstone Ford, where the Old Natchez Trace crossed Bayou Pierre north of milepost 45.7 of the Natchez Trace Parkway, marked the line between the Old Natchez District and the Choctaw Nation. For northbound travelers it was the last settlement before the wilderness. The British traveler Francis Baily reached it at sundown in 1797 and called it the most northern frontier settlement in the district, the place from which travelers dated their departure into the wilderness, with about six hundred miles to go to the Cumberland River in Tennessee. The National Park Service says the ford took its name from a nearby water mill. Baily also recorded why mills fared badly there: crayfish were so plentiful that they undermined every mill dam in the country.
In 1801 and 1802 troops clearing the Trace drew supplies from Fort Deposit, a depot nearby, and troops gathered at the ford during the Burr conspiracy. Daniel Burnet, speaker of the territorial House of Representatives, a principal negotiator with the Choctaw and a framer of the state constitution, kept a plain stand nearby; his guests ate mush and milk in a room crowded with their own gear and his supplies.
The crossing mattered again in May 1863. After the Battle of Port Gibson, Ulysses S. Grant wrote that the bridge over the North Fork of Bayou Pierre was repaired during the night of May 2 and that his troops began crossing at five the next morning, taking fire from a commanding position before the lead brigade was over. The sunken roadbed leading down to the ford, with banks up to ten feet high, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1976.
Getting there
32.0037, -90.8957
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