The monument at Main Street and Trace Street in Tishomingo is the first the Mississippi Daughters of the American Revolution placed on the Natchez Trace. Its granite base was set by the DAR chapter at Corinth in 1908; the metal tablet on it was added in 1988 by the LaSalle Chapter and the Tishomingo Chamber of Commerce. The town lies about 4 km north of the Natchez Trace Parkway, which was not authorized until 1938. The marking campaign was the first organized effort to commemorate the old road, a generation before anyone proposed a parkway. The Mississippi State Society of the DAR, founded in Natchez in 1896, took up the project at its first statewide conference in 1905, planning a granite marker in each county the Trace crossed.
After Tishomingo County came a marker in Natchez in 1909 and one at the Alabama and Mississippi state line in 1913, and by 1933 seventeen stone boulders stood in Mississippi and Tennessee. A DAR stone on County Road 958, evidently the 1913 state-line marker, in the northeast corner of Tishomingo County, about 3.8 km from the parkway, is lettered The Natchez Trace 1791–1913 and says it was marked by the Daughters in Alabama and Mississippi; it calls the road a mail route from 1791 and a well known Indian trail long before, though regular mail service on the Trace began in 1800. The Mississippi Encyclopedia notes that the DAR campaign was winding down in the early 1930s just as the Natchez Trace Military Association was forming to press for a parkway, and that the relationship between the two efforts is unclear.
Getting there
34.6371, -88.2320
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Hear it from the road
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