Twentymile Bottom

Twentymile Bottom, seen from the overlook at milepost 278.4 of the Natchez Trace Parkway in Lee County, is the wide floodplain of Twentymile Creek, and in the early 1800s the Natchez Trace crossed it near a Chickasaw stand kept by a man travellers called the Old Factor. The Methodist circuit rider John Johnson, riding north from Natchez in 1812, stopped near Old Factor's Stand and wrote that he had that day swum his horse five times, bridged one creek, forded several others and waded a swamp, then took his usual lodging on the ground in company with several Indians. The bottom is farmland now, and the Park Service calls it typical of the many low stream crossings the Trace had to make.

The Park Service notes that the area averages about 55 inches of rain a year and has recorded more than 80. Johnson had made the southbound trip the November before, and wrote home from Natchez that his party had come through the Indian nations in nine days and seven hours, forty miles or more a day, and bought corn along the way at $1 to $1.50 a bushel.

On 25 November 1811 another southbound traveller, Samuel Hastings Stackhouse, stopped in the rain at the Old Factor, whom he described as a respectable Indian named for being the principal manufacturer of homespun in the nation, with a large settlement. He noted Indian plantations every few miles and streams he took for the headwaters of the Tombigbee. The Chickasaw ceded the land in 1832, and the survey maps of the cession drawn in 1834 mark the Old Natchez Road with Factor's Field beside it.