Potkopinu

Potkopinu is a three-mile stretch of the original Natchez Trace, preserved as the southernmost section of the Natchez Trace National Scenic Trail and the longest stretch of sunken historic Trace that survives. Its name, pronounced pot-cop-i-new, comes from a Natchez word meaning little valley. The old road is cut deep into the fine-grained loess that blankets the bluffs east of the Mississippi, worn down by centuries of human and animal traffic until its banks stand more than 20 feet high in places. Loess is a silt laid down during the last Ice Age, roughly 20,000 years ago. Lime cements its grains, so undisturbed it will stand in steep walls, but once its surface is broken and the lime leaches out it erodes fast and gullies deeply, which is how a footpath became a trench.

Between 1785 and 1820 the Trace was the road home for the Kaintucks, boatmen who floated goods down the Mississippi to Natchez and New Orleans and walked back north, and after 1801 it was improved as a post road for mail between Natchez and Nashville.

It was also a road of the domestic slave trade: in the years the Trace was a through road, traders marched enslaved people south along it toward the markets at Natchez. The section runs from milepost 17, near Coles Creek, to milepost 20, and the land on either side of it is private.