West Florida Boundary

The West Florida Boundary wayside, at milepost 107.9 of the Natchez Trace Parkway in Madison County, marks the northern edge of a British colony. The Treaty of Paris of 1763, which ended the French and Indian War, gave Britain the French lands east of the Mississippi River except New Orleans, and Spain ceded Florida to Britain, receiving France's territory west of the river in compensation. Britain divided its new Gulf coast holdings into East and West Florida. In 1764, after lobbying by West Florida's first governor, George Johnstone, the colony's northern boundary was set on a line running due east from the mouth of the Yazoo River, near where Vicksburg now stands, to the Chattahoochee River, at latitude 32 degrees 28 minutes.

The line outlived British rule. Spain took West Florida by conquest in 1779–1781, under Bernardo de Gálvez, governor of Louisiana, and then disputed the border with the United States until Pinckney's Treaty of 1795 fixed it at the 31st parallel; Spanish garrisons held on for three more years before withdrawing. When Congress organized the Mississippi Territory in 1798, its northern limit was the old British line at 32 degrees 28 minutes, and not until 1804 was the territory extended north over the rest of the Georgia cession.

The wayside is also the southern terminus of the Yockanookany Section of the Natchez Trace National Scenic Trail, a hiking path that runs 26 miles north to the Yockanookany Trailhead.