Natural Features in Mississippi
39 places
Nature·Claiborne County
Bayou Pierre
Bayou Pierre is the only river system in the world where the bayou darter lives, and the Natchez Trace Parkway bridges it near milepost 49, within the fish's range. The darter was described to science in 1966 from the Highway 18 crossing of Bayou Pierre, was listed as federally threatened in October 1975, and is ranked critically imperiled worldwide. It lives on riffles, in water under six inches deep running moderately to swiftly over firm gravel or sandstone.
Nature·Tishomingo County
Bear Creek's Fishes
The Natchez Trace Parkway crosses Bear Creek inside Tishomingo State Park, near milepost 304.7, on a stream that drains north to the Tennessee River rather than south to the Gulf by way of the Tombigbee. Bear Creek rises in northwest Alabama, loops north through the corner of Mississippi and runs back into Alabama to join the Tennessee, about 80 miles in all, with a mean flow of about 1,126 cubic feet per second at Bishop, Alabama.
Nature·Choctaw County
Big Bywy Ditch
Big Bywy Ditch crosses the Natchez Trace Parkway at about milepost 196 in Choctaw County, three miles north of the Jeff Busby site. It is Big Bywy Creek, a branch of the Big Black River, and the name records what became of it. In 1943 the Mississippi State Geological Survey reported that Big Bywy, Middle Bywy, Besa Chitto and the Yokahockany had been canalized to speed the runoff, because their original channels had been choked by slope wash, especially from cultivated land in the bordering…
Nature·Jefferson County
Bullen Creek
Bullen Creek gives its name to a nature trail at milepost 18.4 of the Natchez Trace Parkway, an 1,100-foot walk whose interpretive stops describe a mature hardwood forest. An older park brochure called it a mixed hardwood and pine forest and allowed fifteen minutes. It lies in the parkway's southernmost ecological section, the Coastal Plains-Loess, which takes in the first 109 miles north of Natchez.
Nature·Tishomingo County
Cave Spring
Cave Spring, at milepost 308.4 of the Natchez Trace Parkway in Tishomingo County, is a collapsed limestone cave. Underground water dissolved a cavern out of the rock until the roof weakened and fell in, leaving a sinkhole bordered by the cave openings. It lies in the northeastern corner of Mississippi, the only part of the state where Paleozoic rock reaches the surface.
Nature·Lee County
Chickasaw Village Prairie
The grassland at the Chickasaw Village Site, milepost 261.8 of the Natchez Trace Parkway on the north side of Tupelo, is the only prairie among the five places where the National Park Service monitors the parkway's vegetation. In 2021 the Gulf Coast Inventory and Monitoring Network sampled four permanent plots there, each 20 by 20 meters, and recorded 131 plant species.
Nature·Lee County
Chiwapa Creek
Chiwapa Creek passes under the Natchez Trace Parkway at about milepost 253.1 in southwestern Lee County, about a mile north of the Black Belt Overlook, on a floodplain more than a mile wide in the Demopolis Chalk country. In the 1940s it could run dry.
Nature·Attala County
Cole Creek
Cole Creek, at milepost 175.6 of the Natchez Trace Parkway in Attala County, has a short Park Service trail through a swamp that is turning into a forest. The 750-foot path, which the park reckons a fifteen-minute walk, begins among water tupelo and bald cypress and ends in mixed bottomland hardwoods. Water tupelo can survive with its roots completely under water, and the swollen base of its trunk, called a buttress, helps hold it upright.
Nature·Madison County
Cypress Swamp
Cypress Swamp, at milepost 122.0 of the Natchez Trace Parkway in Madison County, is a stand of water tupelo and bald cypress growing in an abandoned channel of the Pearl River. According to the National Park Service the river once flowed through the site and then changed course, and as it retreated it left sediment behind that built up a shallow basin. In spells of low water, seedlings of the two flood-tolerant trees took hold, and the swamp grew from them.
Nature·Lee County
Dogwood Valley
Dogwood Valley, at milepost 275.5 of the Natchez Trace Parkway in Lee County, is a small wooded valley the Park Service describes as full of dogwood trees. Flowering dogwood is normally an understory tree 5 to 15 meters tall, and its spring display is not petals but four large white bracts around a cluster of tiny yellow flowers. The Park Service says bloom comes in early April after a warm winter and is held back to late April after a long cold one, and that rangers cannot predict the peak.
Nature·Itawamba County
Donivan Slough
Donivan Slough, at milepost 283.3 of the Natchez Trace Parkway in Itawamba County, is a natural swampy depression, about 350 feet above sea level, in the watershed of Donivan Creek in the Upper Tombigbee basin. Its rich, wet bottomland supports large water-tolerant trees, tulip poplar, sycamore and water oak, while bald cypress grows in the wettest backwaters of the slough channel itself.
Nature·Tishomingo County
Green Salamanders
Tishomingo State Park, at milepost 304 of the Natchez Trace Parkway, is the stronghold of Mississippi's green salamanders, an Appalachian species at the southwestern edge of its range. In the state they are known only from outcrops of Hartselle Sandstone in Tishomingo County, where they live in deep rock crevices and under overhangs in mature forest, and seven of the nine sites reported before 2017 lie inside the park.
Nature·Attala County
Hurricane Creek
Hurricane Creek crosses the Natchez Trace Parkway at milepost 164.3, northeast of Kosciusko in Attala County, and the Park Service trail beside it is about how water in the soil sorts the forest. The 850-foot loop takes in the stream, several soil types and the forest growing on them, which the park describes as a short walk among plants found in different soil conditions; its signs follow them from wet bottomland along the creek up to a dry hilltop.
Nature·Claiborne County
Little Bayou Pierre
Little Bayou Pierre rises southeast of Pattison and runs northwest across Jefferson, Copiah and Claiborne counties to join Bayou Pierre near Port Gibson, and the Natchez Trace Parkway crosses it just east of Port Gibson near milepost 40. It is best known for a fish it lacks.
Nature·Choctaw County
Little Mountain
Little Mountain, the hill that carries the Jeff Busby overlook at milepost 193.1 of the Natchez Trace Parkway in Choctaw County, rises to about 600 feet above sea level. A 1998 geologic map of the Tomnolen quadrangle by the Mississippi Office of Geology places the hill in the Tuscahoma Formation of the Wilcox Group: Paleocene sand, greenish gray when fresh and weathering reddish orange to pale yellow orange, interbedded with clay, silt and lignite, about 400 feet thick in all.
Nature·Jefferson County
Loess Bluff
Loess Bluff, at milepost 12.4 of the Natchez Trace Parkway, is a cut through the windblown silt that caps the hills east of the Mississippi River. The Park Service gives that silt a depth of thirty to ninety feet in this part of Mississippi, resting on older sands and clays. It came out of the river valley.
Nature·Leake County
Myrick Creek
Myrick Creek, at milepost 145.1 of the Natchez Trace Parkway in Leake County, has a short Park Service trail, built, by the park's old brochure, to teach visitors about the beavers there; in June 2012 heavy rain and a beaver dam closed it. The park announced that heavy rains and a beaver dam had flooded the area and undermined the path, just south of Highway 429, and shut the trail until repairs could be made.
Nature·Jefferson County
North Fork Coles Creek
North Fork Coles Creek, which the Natchez Trace Parkway crosses near milepost 25.7 in Jefferson County, had been listed as impaired more often than any other stream the parkway crosses when the Park Service assessed them in 2014. The Park Service's 2014 natural resource condition assessment counted eight listing cycles since 1996, the latest for biological impairment, more than for any of the twenty impaired streams the parkway crosses.
Nature·Claiborne County
Owens Creek Waterfall
Owens Creek Waterfall, at milepost 52.4 of the Natchez Trace Parkway in Claiborne County, is a waterfall that has mostly stopped falling. The Park Service says that only heavy rain now fills the stream, because over the years the water table has dropped several feet and the spring that feeds Owens Creek has all but disappeared.
Nature·Hinds County
Pearl And Big Black Divide
Near milepost 95 of the Natchez Trace Parkway, beside the community of Cynthia in Hinds County, the parkway crosses the divide between the Pearl River and the Big Black River. In the U.S. Geological Survey's Watershed Boundary Dataset the same line separates two of the country's major water resource regions. On the Pearl side, Hanging Moss Creek drains toward the Pearl, which reaches the Gulf at the Mississippi Sound; that ground belongs to the South Atlantic-Gulf Region.
Nature·Madison County
Pearl River Refuge
The Pearl River Waterfowl Refuge lies between the Natchez Trace Parkway and Highway 43 on the north shore of the Ross Barnett Reservoir in Madison County, at the southwestern end of the Pearl River Wildlife Management Area. The management area runs northeast from there between the parkway and the Pearl toward Ratliff Ferry, and the Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks' 2023 map gives it 6,905 acres.
Nature·Lee County
The Black Belt Prairie
The Black Belt Overlook, at milepost 251.9 of the Natchez Trace Parkway in southwestern Lee County, faces a remnant of the Black Belt Prairie, the band of dark calcareous soil that curves from northeast Mississippi across Alabama. Surveyors in the 1830s mapped about 350,000 acres of open prairie across the belt in Mississippi and Alabama, and the National Park Service says development has left most surviving natural sections at only 10 to 20 acres.
Nature·Jefferson County
The Bluff Hills
The Bluff Hills are the band of steep, deeply dissected loess country that borders the Mississippi River floodplain, and on the federal ecoregion map the Natchez Trace Parkway passes through a lobe of them for about a mile and a half between mileposts 28.5 and 30 in Jefferson County. On either side it runs in the Southern Rolling Plains, the gentler country it follows for most of the way from milepost 4 to Bayou Pierre.
Nature·Chickasaw County
The Clayton Caps
At about milepost 236.5, south of Witch Dance Hill, the Natchez Trace Parkway crosses a cap of red sand lying on top of the Cretaceous. The 2023 Office of Geology map of the Houston East quadrangle shows dozens of these patches of Clayton Formation scattered along the ridge crests above the Prairie Bluff Chalk, and the motor road runs over one that reaches the 520 foot contour.
Nature·Hinds County
The Cynthia Clay Pit
The Cynthia clay pit, in Hinds County about a mile and a half northwest of milepost 94 of the Natchez Trace Parkway, was for years the best outcrop of the Yazoo Clay in Mississippi. The Miss-Lite division of Jackson Ready Mix mined the late Eocene marine clay there to make lightweight aggregate at the state's only such plant, which opened on January 22, 1958 and closed in 1992 after 34 years.
Nature·Webster County
The Flatwoods
From about milepost 212 to milepost 220, the Natchez Trace Parkway in Webster and Clay counties crosses the Flatwoods, a belt of low, poorly drained country underlain by the Porters Creek Clay, a marine clay of Paleocene age. The state geologic map shows the clay at the surface along roughly eight miles of the parkway, between the hills to the south and the Clayton Formation to the north.
Nature·Attala County
The French Camp Divide
About two miles south of French Camp, near milepost 179 of the Natchez Trace Parkway, the road crosses the line between two of Mississippi's major river basins, and does not cross back until the Jackson area. North of it, rain runs off by McCurtain Creek and the Bywy creeks of Choctaw County to the Big Black River, which begins in Webster County near Eupora and flows southwest about 300 miles to the Mississippi River, twenty-five miles below Vicksburg.
Nature·Tishomingo County
The Hartselle Sandstone
The cliffs and moss-covered boulders along Bear Creek in Tishomingo State Park are Hartselle Sandstone, a tightly cemented sandstone with thin shale beds laid down in the Late Mississippian, more than 320 million years ago. The outcrops sit at the southwestern end of the plateau country that runs down from the Appalachians, and they have more in common with the rocks of the southern Appalachians in Alabama, Tennessee and Georgia than with anything else in Mississippi.
Nature·Attala County
The Kosciusko Sand
The Kosciusko Formation takes its name from the town that sits on it. The geologist C. W. Cooke proposed the name in 1925 for ledges of sugary to quartzitic sandstone exposed around Kosciusko, the seat of Attala County, replacing the name Decatur sand, which had already been claimed for another formation.
Nature·Chickasaw County
The Prairie Bluff Chalk
South of Dicks Creek, near milepost 238 of the Natchez Trace Parkway, the motor road climbs off the Ripley Formation onto the Prairie Bluff Chalk, the last Cretaceous formation along this stretch of the parkway, and follows it along the ridge toward Witch Dance.
Nature·Madison County
The Ringed Map Turtle
The ringed map turtle, Graptemys oculifera, lives almost entirely in the Pearl River and its major tributaries in Mississippi and Louisiana, with one small, separate population found in 2021 in Louisiana's Bogue Falaya, and the one stretch of river formally set aside for it begins at Ratliff Ferry, on the Pearl east of milepost 124 of the Natchez Trace Parkway.
Nature·Pontotoc County
The Ripley Cuesta
At about milepost 247.6 the Natchez Trace Parkway leaves the floodplain of Tallabinnela Creek and climbs the east face of the Pontotoc Ridge, a ridge held up by the Ripley Formation. The 2024 Office of Geology map of the Troy Southeast quadrangle shows the motor road crossing from creek alluvium near the 340 foot contour onto Ripley beds that rise past 440 feet, with the Demopolis Chalk of the Black Prairie in the valleys to the east.
Nature·Tishomingo County
The Tennessee Divide
Between mileposts 303 and 304, at the southwest edge of Tishomingo State Park, the Natchez Trace Parkway crosses the divide between the Tennessee River and the Tombigbee. Rain falling on the north side runs to Bear Creek and the Tennessee, and from there by way of the Ohio and the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico. Rain on the south side runs to Mackeys Creek and the Tombigbee, which reaches the Gulf through the Mobile River and Mobile Bay.
Nature·Webster County
The Tombigbee Divide
At milepost 211.5 of the Natchez Trace Parkway in Webster County, north of Mathiston, the road crosses the divide between the Mississippi River and Mobile Bay. Rain falling to the southwest drains to Moores Creek and the Big Black River, which joins the Mississippi below Vicksburg. Rain falling to the northeast drains to Line Creek, part of the Tibbee Creek and Tombigbee River system, which reaches the Gulf of Mexico through Mobile Bay.
Nature·Webster County
The Upper Big Black
The Big Black River passes within about 500 meters of the Natchez Trace Parkway near milepost 207 in Webster County, less than three miles north of Mathiston, where it is a small stream close to its source. The channel the U.S. Geological Survey maps as the Big Black River begins in northeastern Webster County and winds south about 14 miles to the stretch beside the parkway, where it becomes the straightened Big Black River Canal and turns west, passing south of Eupora.
Nature·Attala County
The Winona Greensand
Southeast of Kosciusko, around milepost 161 of the Natchez Trace Parkway, the road runs along hills of Winona greensand under a cap of Zilpha clay, the two mapped together on the state's 2006 geologic map of the Kosciusko quadrangle. The Winona is a marine sand rich in glauconite, a green mineral bearing iron and potassium, and it takes its name from exposures at Winona in Montgomery County. Fresh, it is gray to green.
Nature·Madison County
The Yazoo Clay
The Yazoo Clay, a late Eocene marine clay, lies beneath the Natchez Trace Parkway north of Jackson in Madison County, and at the Choctaw Agency site, milepost 100.7 in Ridgeland, it surfaced in the record early. In 1811 the Choctaw agent Silas Dinsmoor dug a well there in an unsuccessful search for water and struck fossil oyster shells in the clay. He displayed them in the agency house, where, by one geologist's account, early travelers on the Trace saw them.
Nature·Lee County
Town Creek Floodplain
Town Creek, also known as Old Town Creek and as the West Fork of the Tombigbee River, passes under the Natchez Trace Parkway at about milepost 264.3 on the north side of Tupelo. The U.S. Geological Survey's station Town Creek at Natchez Trace near Tupelo sits at the crossing, where the creek drains 109 square miles. It is a stream of extremes: a 1950 state report on surface waters recorded 12,600 cubic feet per second at the Oldtown Creek gauge at Tupelo on March 28, 1944, and a flow of 0.
Nature·Attala County
Yockanookany River
The Yockanookany River is the valley the Natchez Trace Parkway follows south from Kosciusko. A tributary of the Pearl, it begins in Choctaw County northwest of Ackerman and runs southwest through the middle of Attala County into Leake County. Below Kosciusko the parkway stays within about a mile of it for long stretches, and the Park Service's paleontological inventory notes that the road was built immediately west of the river.