The cabin at milepost 102.4 of the Natchez Trace Parkway in Ridgeland was the parkway's first museum and, for more than thirty years, the Mississippi Crafts Center. The National Park Service dedicated it as the Ridgeland Museum in November 1951. In 1955 it was still the only wayside museum on a parkway that had 113 paved miles, no campgrounds and no modern restrooms. It was rarely staffed until 1972, and visits fell sharply in the 1960s while the parkway around the new Ross Barnett Reservoir was closed for relocation. In 1975 the Park Service offered the building as a concession, and on June 14 of that year the Craftsmen's Guild of Mississippi opened it as the Ridgeland Crafts Center.
The guild was not yet two years old. Governor Bill Waller and Dan Overly, a craftsman and Delta State University graduate student, founded it in 1973, and it began with about 30 members, only two of whom made a living from craft. Open seven days a week, the crafts center sold members' work and held demonstrations and workshops, and it gave the parkway a second staffed visitor station at no cost to the government. In October 1982 it held a Choctaw Day with Choctaw crafts and stickball.
On June 8, 2007, the guild moved to a new building on Rice Road, near Brashears Stand, later named for Waller. The cabin became the Parkway Information Cabin, and the lot behind it is a trailhead for the Chisha Foka Multi-Use Trail.
Getting there
32.4262, -90.1260
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
Hear it from the road
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