Rocky Springs Methodist Church, a brick church built in 1837 on the crest of a hill west of milepost 54.8 of the Natchez Trace Parkway, is the last building left of Rocky Springs, a farming community that grew up around a spring beside the Old Natchez Trace. Settlement began in the late 1790s, and by 1860, according to the National Park Service, the community spread across some 25 square miles, and its people included carpenters, wheelwrights, cabinetmakers, a cotton gin maker and blacksmiths, with a post office, a Masonic lodge and possibly a school. The decline came in stages. In May 1863 Ulysses S. Grant's army marched through on the road from Port Gibson toward Jackson, and his memoirs record that two of his corps commanders, James B. McPherson and John A. McClernand, were both at Rocky Springs on the night of May 7.
A letter written that year complained that the writer's slaves, horses and mules had been carried off, the fences torn down and the crops destroyed. Yellow fever struck in the summer and fall of 1878, and a pastor, J. W. Sandwell, counted 180 cases and 43 deaths. The boll weevil ruined the cotton crop in the early 1900s, the population fell away, the last store closed in the 1930s, and the spring stopped flowing.
The congregation kept meeting until it disbanded in April 2010. The church, a plain vernacular building with Federal lines and few alterations, is regarded as one of the most intact antebellum churches in Mississippi. It stands outside the parkway's property with its cemetery, and the Park Service lists two old safes and several abandoned cisterns as the other remains of the town.
Getting there
32.0898, -90.8135
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