In 1802 John Gordon, a militia captain and since 1796 the postmaster of Nashville, arranged with the Chickasaw chief William Colbert to run a trading post and a ferry where the Natchez Trace crossed the Duck River. The treaties that opened the road reserved the ferries on it to the Chickasaw nation, so a partnership was how a white trader got in, and a written version of the bargain survives in the Tennessee state archives. Gordon was away at war for much of what followed, riding with Andrew Jackson in the Creek War and into Florida against the Seminoles in 1818. His wife Dorothea ran the place and oversaw the building of the brick house that still stands above the crossing, finished in 1818. He died that June. She lived on there until 1859. The crossing itself is a slope in the bank below the house.
The ferry outlasted them both, working more than ninety years until a bridge was built at the crossing in 1896. Gordon's holding came to about fifteen hundred acres and the couple had eleven children, the youngest born that February, a few months before her father's death. The Colbert brothers are easily confused and usually are: George Colbert, William's brother, ran the ferry over the Tennessee River further south, and most travel writing attaches this bargain to him instead. Of the fifty or so stands that once stood along the Natchez Trace, two buildings survive. Mount Locust is in Mississippi. This is the other one.
Getting there
35.7169, -87.2609
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.
