Reservoir Overlook

The Reservoir Overlook, at milepost 105.6 of the Natchez Trace Parkway in Madison County, faces the Ross Barnett Reservoir, a 33,000-acre impoundment of the Pearl River that is Mississippi's largest source of drinking water. Building it closed part of the parkway for six years. Governor J. P. Coleman signed the act creating the Pearl River Valley Water Supply District in 1958, and on August 25 of that year President Dwight Eisenhower signed a law letting the district relocate the parkway through Madison County. The Park Service priced the work at about $3.3 million, for 8.6 miles of new roadway and 4.7 miles raised in profile, and roughly 20 miles of parkway were closed to through traffic from 1962 to 1968.

The relocated parkway was supposed to be open by 1966. When work lagged, the Bureau of Public Roads terminated the first contractor, which blamed government harassment and indecision, and a new contract went to the Cook Construction Company on June 29, 1967. The section around the reservoir opened to through traffic on June 8, 1968. Nearly $4 million in federal money went into a project first proposed as costing little beyond incidentals, and parkway travel that June ran 41 percent above the June before.

The reservoir is named for Ross Barnett, governor from 1960 to 1964, who campaigned as a vigorous segregationist and is most remembered for his failed resistance to the integration of the University of Mississippi in 1962. The overlook is the northern end of the Chisha Foka Multi-Use Trail, a 10-mile paved path named for the Choctaw town that stood where Jackson is; the name means among the post oaks.