A mile south of the parkway's Wayne County marker for it, the old Natchez Trace crossed a depression in a flat, dogwood-covered ridge, and after heavy rain that depression became almost impassable to wagons. It was called the Dogwood Mudhole. Meriwether Lewis camped there on his last journey in 1809 and some of his horses got away from him in the night, which is the best-attested thing that ever happened at the spot. The name is on the map because the Park Service put it there, and the place itself is a mile off the road and unmarked. The Highland Rim flattens out along its ridgetops, and flat ground on a ridge is where water stands rather than runs off. The Park Service put the name on the map; the mudhole itself is unmarked and a mile off the road.
What happened afterwards is the ordinary life of a dirt road. Nobody repaired it. Drivers went round, the detour hardened into the route, and the old line was left to the brush, so the trace at a bad crossing is not a road but a spread of abandoned attempts at the same hundred yards. The parkway preserves a segment further south, at the Sunken Trace, where three separate detours around one wet place are still visible side by side. It is the clearest thing on the whole road for showing what a mudhole actually did to it. Wagons made the detours; nobody surveyed those either.
Getting there
35.2869, -87.6018
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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