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. On the other side, Bogue Chitto Creek, not to be confused with the Pearl's Bogue Chitto River, drains to the Big Black and so to the Mississippi River, in the Lower Mississippi Region.

The two rivers reach the Gulf by very different roads. The Big Black begins in Webster County near Eupora and flows southwest for about 300 miles to the Mississippi, twenty-five miles south of Vicksburg; the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality puts its basin at about 3,384 square miles, some 155 miles long and 22 wide on average. The Pearl rises in Neshoba County, passes the Jackson metropolitan area and empties into the Mississippi Sound, draining about 8,000 square miles of Mississippi and Louisiana, including the Ross Barnett Reservoir, the state's largest surface source of drinking water.

Along the parkway the divide is the hinge of the whole stretch. Every mapped stream it crosses from the divide north to milepost 140 in Leake County belongs to the Pearl: Hanging Moss, White Oak, Culley and Brashear creeks around Ridgeland, then the creeks feeding the Pearl and the Yockanookany. Southwest of the divide, Bogue Chitto Creek and Lindsey Creek at Clinton both drain to the Big Black.