LeFleur's Stand

Louis LeFleur's stand, the inn and trading post that gave French Camp its name, stood about 900 feet northeast of milepost 180.7 of the Natchez Trace Parkway, according to the National Park Service. LeFleur, a trader of French descent, had first dealt with the Choctaw at a bluff on the Pearl River that is now part of Jackson, and about 1812 he opened a stand on the Trace deep in the Choctaw Nation. Because of his nationality the settlement was often called French Camp, and the village kept the name. Many stands of the period were run by traders married into Choctaw or Chickasaw families, whose nations let women hold property.

LeFleur's wife was Nancy Cravat, a Choctaw woman. Their son Greenwood, born in 1800, was sent at twelve to live with Maj. John Donly's family in Nashville, and came home in 1817 having eloped with Donly's daughter Rosa. He became chief of the western Choctaw towns in 1826, and in 1830, having been elected the nation's principal chief that year, he was one of three chiefs who signed the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, which ceded the land around French Camp to the United States. He stayed in Mississippi as a planter and legislator; the city of Greenwood and Leflore County are named for him.

Beside the Park Service sign stands a granite memorial presented to the town by the Mississippi Daughters of the American Revolution on November 10, 1915. Its inscription says Andrew Jackson's Tennessee and Kentucky troops rested at French Camp on the way to his War of 1812 campaign on the Gulf Coast. In 1822, the historian Clara Sue Kidwell writes, the missionary Loring S. Williams came to the French Camps settlement to found a mission station.