Mount Locust

Mount Locust is the only surviving stand, or inn, on the Natchez Trace and one of the oldest buildings in Mississippi. The house first appears on a Spanish survey of 1785, a year after William Ferguson and his wife Paulina acquired the land. Family tradition holds that it took in travelers from about that time, when the flatboatmen known as Kaintucks, having sold their cargoes at Natchez and New Orleans, walked home north along the Trace. For 25 cents a boatman got a meal of corn mush and milk and a place to sleep on the porch or the grounds. Paulina, who later married James Chamberlain, an overseer at Mount Locust, kept the stand until around 1842 by family tradition, and the Ferguson and Chamberlain family lived in the house for five generations, until 1944.

The farm became a cotton plantation built on enslaved labor. Paulina Ferguson's household held 26 enslaved people in 1820, 42 in 1830 and 53 at the appraisal of her estate in 1849, and the 1854 estate of her son Thomas Jefferson Chamberlain, which took in the adjoining Liverpool plantation, lists 98. In 1998 a survey of a wooded ridge northwest of the house mapped 42 regularly shaped grave depressions, apparently arranged by family, and the Park Service counts 43 enslaved people buried there. In July 1863 two brothers held by the Chamberlains, Anthony and Paris Martin, escaped and enlisted in the 50th United States Colored Troops at Natchez. Both survived the war and returned to Jefferson County, where Paris died in 1917.

The National Park Service acquired the house in 1937 for the parkway and restored it in 1955 and 1956 to its appearance around 1820, the height of travel on the Trace. It was named for the honey locust trees that once surrounded it.