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. The crossing lies at about 460 feet, on the crest of a north to south line of hills that geologists call the Midway-Wilcox cuesta.
At the crossing the drainage divide and the cuesta coincide. Southwest of the crossing the parkway runs on the sand and silty shale of the Naheola Formation; northeast of it the road drops more than 100 feet in about two and a half miles onto the dark Porters Creek clay of the Flatwoods. The state geological survey's 1952 Webster County report described the same scarp a few miles east, on the Gulf, Mobile and Ohio Railroad north of Cumberland, where the track descends 123 feet in less than three miles, diagonally across the steep side of the cuesta.
The report placed the county's highest ground probably on this cuesta, in the northeast of the county, and described the Flatwoods to its east as low rolling to flat country.
Getting there
33.6287, -89.0811
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