The Chickasaw Village Site on the Natchez Trace Parkway in west Tupelo began as Ackia Battleground National Monument, a federal memorial to a battle that was not, as it turned out, fought on it. Congress authorized a monument to the Battle of Ackia by an act of 27 August 1935, and on 25 October 1938 President Franklin Roosevelt proclaimed 49.15 acres in Lee County as the monument. The battle it honoured was fought on 26 May 1736, when a French army under Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, governor of Louisiana, supported by about 600 Choctaw warriors, stormed a fortified Chickasaw village called Ackia and was driven off after hours of fighting and heavy losses.
When the monument was proclaimed, the Park Service said only that the land it had selected appeared to include the village where the battle occurred, and it arranged with the Smithsonian Institution for an archeologist to settle the question. The digging that followed did not settle it; the Park Service's own administrative history calls it a vain effort to locate the site of Ackia. In 2017 the archaeologist Charles Cobb and colleagues identified Ackia at a site now largely obliterated by a residential neighbourhood. On 10 August 1961 Congress folded the monument into the parkway and directed that it be given a name in keeping with the historical events which occurred on it. It became Chickasaw Village, where the outlines of Chickasaw houses are marked out on the ground.
Getting there
34.2788, -88.7420
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
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