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. The historic prairie supported bluestems, switchgrass and Indian grass, and bison once grazed it. In 2016 the park took land near the overlook out of agricultural leasing and planted 6,500 native wildflower and grass seedlings, grown from seed collected at other Black Belt sites on the parkway.
The soil comes from the rock. In this part of Lee County the bedrock is the Demopolis Chalk, a massive gray marly chalk of the Late Cretaceous that the 2019 Office of Geology map of the Bissell quadrangle shows up to about 300 feet thick, formed from the calcium-rich shells of a sea that once covered the region. A 1977 Mississippi State University summary of the state's soil areas describes Blackland Prairie soils as high in calcium and full of montmorillonite clay that shrinks and swells as it dries and wets, naming series such as Okolona, Houston and Sumter.
About two miles west the ground rises onto the sands and limestones of the Ripley Formation and the Pontotoc Ridge, where the sands weather to red rather than black.
Getting there
34.1495, -88.8201
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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