Garrison Creek

Garrison Creek is named for a United States Army post that stood beside it in 1801 and 1802, at the northern end of the work that turned a footpath into a road. The order of events is the opposite of what it looks like. The Post Office wanted the mail moved between Nashville and Natchez, the road was designated a post road in 1800, and it was the Postmaster who suggested putting army troops in western Tennessee to the job of cutting it. The Chickasaw and the Choctaw agreed in 1801 to let the road through, and the soldiers went to work: widen the track to eight feet, enough for a wagon, and clear the brush four feet further on each side. The agreement itself never mentions the mail; what it grants is a convenient wagon road.

They were regular infantry of the Second Infantry, thirty men at a time for thirty days before relief, doing pick and axe work in country with no supply line behind it, and the detachment camped in this Williamson County hollow opened the stretch running south out of Nashville. The work was slow and did not stay finished. Wilkinson's job of 1801 was not called complete until 1807, and the road was not reliably passable by wagon until about 1809. This particular stretch had a shorter career than most: the section of Old Trace between Nashville and Duck River Ridge was dropped as a post road in 1802, the same year the soldiers left.