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. Mississippi's 1919 plant survey described the Flatwoods soil as heavy, tenacious dark gray clay, wet and cold except in dry years, acid and poor in lime, carrying open forest of loblolly pine, southern red oak and post oak.
The state geological survey's 1952 Webster County report described the fresh clay as dark gray to bluish black, extremely fine grained, tough when moist and brittle when dry. It breaks along curved surfaces into spheroids that shed shells like the layers of an onion and finally crumble to a flaky meal, which takes up water and becomes a tenacious mud. The report called a creek-cut bluff about a mile southeast of Dancy, at least 300 yards long and up to 50 feet high, the largest Porters Creek outcrop in Webster County and one of the largest in Mississippi.
The same 1919 survey gave the Flatwoods a width of three to fifteen miles, and south of Houston traced it along the western edge of the Black Belt into Alabama.
Getting there
33.6876, -89.0420
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
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