In 1799 Winthrop Sargent, governor of the Mississippi Territory, recommended opening a post road north, and his reasons were national security first and the mail second. What he asked for was a road to Knoxville. He did not get it: the Cherokee refused passage across their country, and when the Choctaw and the Chickasaw agreed in 1801 the road ran to Nashville instead. A contract went to Abijah Hunt in 1800 to carry the mail between Nashville and Natchez for twenty-four hundred dollars a year, and riders were making the trip in ten to fifteen days before the army had cut anything at all. The mail went by sea and around Florida before that, and took months over it. Sargent wanted it for defence as much as for letters.
One rider carried the bag the whole five hundred miles, changing horses rather than handing over, and the only one of them whose name survives is John Lee Swaney. The mail is what shaped the road. The army widened it because the Post Office needed it passable, the stands were opened along it by leave of the Chickasaw and Choctaw because riders and travellers had to be fed, and the route moved as the country did: when Columbia was founded in 1807 the mail was sent through the new town and commercial traffic followed it. What finished the road was partly steam on the rivers and partly Jackson's Military Road, opened in 1817, which ran to New Orleans by a shorter line.
Getting there
35.7503, -87.2052
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
Hear it from the road
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