The Natchez Trace Parkway took sixty-seven years to build. Ground was broken in 1937, a year before Congress made it a unit of the National Park Service on 18 May 1938, after a survey ordered in 1934 and a campaign led by Thomas J. Busby, a Mississippi congressman who got his survey bill through and watched his construction bill fail. The Civilian Conservation Corps, the Works Progress Administration and the Public Works Administration all took a hand. Tennessee's stretch was finished last: the section running down to Tennessee Highway 100 at Pasquo opened in 1996, and the final two segments of the whole 444-mile road, both of them in Mississippi, did not open until 21 May 2005. Sixty-seven years is longer than the road was ever a road.
What stretched the work out was war and money rather than any difficulty in the ground. Construction stopped for the Second World War and then waited through a long appropriations drought while federal spending went elsewhere. The states bought the land in pieces and deeded it to the federal government as they went. Commercial traffic was excluded from the start and there is no advertising and no frontage along any of it, which is the decision that still shapes the drive. Tennessee's share is just over a hundred miles across seven counties: Davidson, Williamson, Hickman, Maury, Lewis, Lawrence and Wayne.
Getting there
36.0366, -86.9761
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.
