A stand on the old Natchez Trace in a corner of Wayne County kept a tavern and a blacksmith's shop for travellers from early in the nineteenth century, and the blacksmith was as much of the business as the beds were, because a road like this one broke wheels. The two markers at the site do not agree about who started it. The Park Service credits John McGlamery with establishing a stand nearby in 1849. The Tennessee Historical Commission records only an early proprietor who came in 1818 and lies buried with his family in the cemetery to the north-east, and does not name him. Either way the place did not outlast the Civil War. Neither marker agrees with the other about the century, let alone the decade.
The name did. The settlement that grew up around the site is still called McGlamery Stand. Cypress Inn, some ten miles further south on the same road, is the same kind of survival: the inn is long gone and the community kept the sign. By the 1840s a stand on the Trace was not serving the Natchez trade at all, which had shifted to the river twenty years earlier. It was serving drovers, wagoners and farmers on a road that had shrunk from a national highway back into a county lane, and that is the version of the Trace that lasted longest. That is the Trace most of its life: a local road with a famous name.
Getting there
35.1459, -87.7430
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
Hear it from the road
Whistlestop tells you this story automatically when you drive past. No searching, no tapping, nothing to ask.
