Sunken Trace

The Sunken Trace, at milepost 41.5 of the Natchez Trace Parkway near Port Gibson, is a section of the Old Natchez Trace worn deep into the ground by traffic. The National Park Service traces the corridor back centuries to animal paths used by American Indian tribes. As the United States pushed west in the late 1700s and early 1800s, growing numbers of travelers beat it into a clearly marked road, and where the soil was soft loess, thousands of walkers, riders and wagons cut the path down into a sunken lane. The Park Service counts the view down the sunken lane among the more iconic pictures of the Natchez Trace. Much of the traffic was boatmen, known as Kaintucks, who floated cargo down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to Natchez and New Orleans and came home overland, walking or riding some 500 miles.

The trade began, according to a National Register nomination for a nearby section of the Trace, in 1785, when a small scow from Pittsburgh loaded with flour landed at Spanish Natchez. Mail began to travel the road in 1800 and continued into the 1830s, President Thomas Jefferson authorized improvements to it in 1801, and by 1810 about 8,000 to 10,000 people were using it.

The Park Service lists the hardships of the journey: heat, mosquitoes, poor food, hard beds or none, disease, swollen rivers and sucking swamps, on a road where a broken arm or leg could mean death for a traveler alone. Travel fell off as steamboats took over the river trade, and stands along the road closed or moved, though settlers used stretches of it for local travel for decades. The Natchez Trace Parkway was created in 1938 to memorialize the old road.