Tockshish

Tockshish, also called McIntoshville, was a settlement of Chickasaw and white families on the old Natchez Trace in Pontotoc County, and in 1801 it became the second post office between Nashville and Natchez, a relay station where post riders exchanged tired horses for fresh ones. The National Park Service derives the name from a Chickasaw word meaning tree root. The settlement grew around John McIntosh, a British agent who lived among the Chickasaw before 1770 and married the widow of the trader James Colbert. After McIntosh died, around 1803, she kept the tavern going, and travellers on the road mentioned the McIntosh tavern in their journals from 1797.

A traveller who came through in April 1803 described a horse-powered grist mill, large fields well fenced and cultivated, plenty of horses, cows and hogs, and the best cured bacon found on the road, bought from the Chickasaw. He also noted a great many white people in the neighbourhood, among whom the federal agent acted as magistrate. The Chickasaw Nation later paid for a school at Tokshish, one of three it funded beside the Presbyterian mission at Monroe, and the Chickasaw leader William Colbert is said to have lived there. The name faded once the Chickasaw lands were ceded in 1832 and sold; the historian Dawson Phelps found it on no map published after the late 1830s. The federal Geographic Names Information System places the settlement about 3.5 kilometres west of the parkway's Tockshish exhibit at milepost 249.6, and the name survives in Toxish Church and Toxish Road, some 8 kilometres further west, where the Chickasaw school stood.