Travellers called the Natchez Trace the Devil's Backbone, and the name was a complaint. The road ran some four hundred and forty miles through the Chickasaw and Choctaw nations, past the reach of any state's law, with inns a day apart and every part of the journey harder than it looked on a map. Robbery, fever, snakebite, swollen rivers and simply losing the line all took a share of the people who set out on it. Tennessee has since moved the name onto a hill. The ridge the parkway follows through Lewis County is now Devil's Backbone State Park, more than 1,500 acres, dedicated and opened in March 2026. The trail is reached straight off the parkway, from the federal road the name came off. Tennessee runs the hill; the Park Service runs the road it is named for.
The ground was bought in the 1960s meaning to make a park of it and then sat for thirty years as a 950-acre state natural area, designated in 1997 and still there inside the larger park. A loop of about three and a half miles runs the ridgeline, drops into a hollow and climbs back, something over two hundred feet of change. The forest is oak and hickory on the ridges with beech, tuliptree and sugar maple in the coves, the usual arrangement where a hard cap of bedded chert holds a ridge up and water breaks out along the shale beneath it. Nothing in particular ever happened on the hill. The state offers a gentler reading of the name than the travellers meant, that the route ties three states together like a spine.
Getting there
35.6030, -87.4057
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.
