Memphis, Shiloh, the Natchez Trace, Nashville and the Smokies in 7 Days

This is a Monday. Begin at the C.H. Nash Museum at Chucalissa, a Mississippian town on a bluff above the river, first settled around 1000 CE. Its name is Chickasaw for "abandoned house," and the museum acknowledges the ground as Chickasaw homeland, also the country of the Choctaw and Quapaw Nations. In 1854 the bottomland was bought as a cotton plantation, and nineteen enslaved people were purchased with it. In the 1930s the state made it a park for Black residents, the Jim Crow counterpart of a whites-only forest park, and Civilian Conservation Corps workers preparing a swimming area found the mounds. It is a National Historic Landmark and a teaching site, so ask what the students are digging. Drive nine miles and about 20 minutes to the Stax Museum of American Soul Music, built on the East McLemore Avenue corner where the Capitol theater stood. Stax was racially integrated when Memphis was not: Booker T. and the M.G.'s cut "Green Onions" here, and Otis Redding, Carla Thomas, Sam and Dave, Isaac Hayes and the Staple Singers recorded in the studio. Less than a mile on, Elmwood Cemetery opened in 1852 and holds the whole of Memphis, Confederate officers and a slave trader as well as Robert R. Church Sr. and the civil rights leader Maxine Smith. About 2,500 victims of the yellow fever epidemic of 1878 lie in four public lots. The grounds are free and open daily from 8 to 4:30. Drive two and a half miles downtown to the National Civil Rights Museum, which keeps part of the Lorraine Motel where Martin Luther King Jr. was shot on April 4, 1968. Give it a slow afternoon. A block away the NAACP marker in Army Park records the three days in May 1866 when white mobs attacked Black South Memphis. Forty-six Black people and two white people died, the mobs burned 91 houses, four churches and a dozen schools, and no one was prosecuted. Walk to Beale Street and go by day to read the markers; Beale Street Baptist Church, built in 1864, is the oldest surviving Black church building in Tennessee, and Ida B. Wells co-edited the Free Speech and Headlight from it. End at Sun Studio at 706 Union Avenue, where Jackie Brenston cut "Rocket 88" in 1951 and Elvis Presley made his first Sun single in July 1954; tour times are on its site. Spend the night in Memphis.

This is a Tuesday. Drive 68 miles and about two hours north on US 51 and west on Tennessee 87 to Fort Pillow State Historic Park. The bluff above the Mississippi was Chickasaw country until the treaty of 1818, and by early 1864 the Union-held fort was a recruiting post for Black soldiers. On April 12, 1864, about 1,500 Confederate cavalrymen under Major General Nathan Bedford Forrest attacked a garrison of roughly 600, about half of them Black soldiers of the United States Colored Troops and the rest white Tennessee Unionists. Many men were shot or bayoneted as they tried to surrender or flee, and historians' tallies put the deaths at about 64 percent of the Black troops and at least 31 percent of the white. Forrest claimed the garrison refused to surrender; survivors, a congressional committee and most historians since have called it a massacre. The state has run the site since 1971, and the museum is open daily from 8 to 4. The earthworks are small and the walk is quiet. Drive 22 miles and about 45 minutes back to Henning and the Alex Haley House Museum, the bungalow where Alex Haley lived from 1921 to 1929 and heard the family stories that became Roots in 1976. The book has been questioned: Haley settled a plagiarism suit in 1978, and genealogists have found that the written records do not support the line of descent he described. He is buried in the front yard. Drive 26 miles and about 45 minutes to the Tina Turner Museum at Flagg Grove School beside Interstate 40 at Brownsville. Anna Mae Bullock went to this one-room school for Black children at Nutbush in the 1940s, and the school was moved here in 2012. Brownsville has harder history too: in June 1940 Elbert Williams, a founder of the local NAACP chapter, was taken from his home by law officers, and his body was found three days later in the Hatchie River. No one was charged. Then drive 29 miles on I-40 to Jackson and spend the night there.

Drive 15 miles and about 25 minutes south on US 45 to Pinson Mounds, the largest group of Middle Woodland mounds in the United States, built mostly between about 100 and 300 CE. Sauls Mound, at 72 feet, is the second tallest mound in the country, and Ozier Mound, raised in at least six stages, gave the first firm evidence in 1981 that flat-topped platform mounds were built centuries earlier than anyone had assumed. This was a gathering place, not a village, and pottery from the Tennessee River valley, southern Georgia and Mobile Bay turned up here. The Twin Mounds are a burial place and are treated as one. Then drive 47 miles and about an hour and ten minutes to Shiloh National Military Park. The battle of April 6 and 7, 1862 was the bloodiest of the war up to that time: about 65,000 Union and 44,000 Confederate soldiers fought in the woods around a log church, and 23,746 were killed, wounded or missing. Union divisions turned back at least eight attacks on the Sunken Road, which the Confederates named the Hornets' Nest, until as many as 53 guns were massed against it and General Benjamin Prentiss surrendered with nearly 2,200 men. Congress made the park in 1894, and the national cemetery was begun in 1866. Entry is free. A mile and a quarter away, the Shiloh Indian Mounds were a palisaded town of seven mounds on the bluff, the center of a chiefdom that held about 20 miles of the river valley and traded with Cahokia. One mound was used for the burial of leaders, so walk it as you would a graveyard. Drive 11 miles to Savannah and the Tennessee River Museum, in a post office of 1939. The stone pipe found at the mounds in 1899, carved as a kneeling man, is inside, and so is the Trail of Tears exhibit: the museum says a party of Cherokee passed along Savannah's main street in 1838 before crossing the river, and a second group traveled on the river itself. Spend the night in Savannah.

Drive 59 miles and about 80 minutes east on US 64 to David Crockett State Park in Lawrenceburg, where David Crockett ran a water-powered gristmill, a powder mill and a distillery on Shoal Creek between about 1817 and 1822. The legend leaves out that he broke with Andrew Jackson over the Indian removal bill and lost his seat in 1831. The state opened the park on May 31, 1959, as a segregated facility, a separate section for Black visitors opened two years later, and it was integrated in the mid-1960s. Three miles on, the James D. Vaughan Southern Gospel Music Museum stands on the third floor of the Vaughan Municipal Building. Vaughan founded his publishing company in Lawrenceburg in 1903, sold shape-note songbooks that let people who could not read music learn to sing parts, sent four singers on the road as a traveling quartet in 1910 and bought WOAN, the first commercially licensed radio station in Tennessee, in 1922. Check with Lawrence County for hours. Fill the tank here, then drive 29 miles and about 40 minutes north on US 43 and Tennessee 20 to the Meriwether Lewis Site at milepost 385.9 of the Natchez Trace Parkway. Lewis died here at Grinder's Stand on the morning of October 11, 1809, at 35. The Park Service says historical accounts support the probability of suicide and that accounts from 1848 on suggest he may have been murdered, and the monument paid for by Tennessee's legislature in 1848 is a column left deliberately broken. Take the Parkway north 22 miles and about 40 minutes to the Gordon House and Ferry Site at milepost 407.7. In 1802 John Gordon went into partnership with William Colbert, a Chickasaw leader, to run a ferry and an inn here, because the ground was still Chickasaw territory; the Chickasaw ceded it in 1805. The house is closed inside, but you can walk the Old Trace to the Duck River. The Parkway has 36 more miles to its northern terminus at milepost 444, then 18 miles on to Nashville, where you spend the night. The Parkway has a 50 mph limit and no commercial vehicles.

This is a Friday. Start at Fisk University and Jubilee Hall. Fisk Free Colored School opened on January 9, 1866, in former Union army hospital barracks, and enrollment went from two hundred in February to nine hundred by May as formerly enslaved Nashvillians of every age came to learn their letters. In 1871, with the roofs leaking, the treasurer George White took a student choir on tour, and the Jubilee Singers came home in 1874 with nearly fifty thousand dollars after singing for Queen Victoria. It built Jubilee Hall, dedicated in 1876. The Fisk University Galleries are free and open Monday to Friday, 10 to 4. Drive two miles to the Tennessee State Capitol, whose cornerstone was laid on July 4, 1845. The first work, cutting the cellar out of the limestone hill, was done by enslaved men: the building committee hired fifteen from a Nashville stone mason at $18 a month each. Entry is free. A few blocks on, the Civil Rights Room on the second floor of the library is built around a circular lunch counter, and its collection holds more than a hundred oral-history interviews with people who took part in Nashville's sit-ins. On February 13, 1960, students from Fisk, American Baptist Theological Seminary, Meharry and Tennessee State took seats at counters on Fifth Avenue that closed rather than serve them. It is free and open during the library's hours. The National Museum of African American Music opened on January 30, 2021, and covers gospel, blues, jazz, rhythm and blues and hip-hop; the Fisk Jubilee Singers are in it. Next door the Ryman Auditorium opened in 1892 as the Union Gospel Tabernacle. Its balcony, added in 1897 with money from the Confederate Veterans Association, was called the Confederate Gallery until a 2017 plaque replaced that name, and Tennessee's Jim Crow laws called for segregated audiences. End at Fort Negley, two miles south, built from August to December 1862 by more than 2,700 conscripted laborers, mostly people who had escaped slavery. An estimated 600 to 800 men and women died building Nashville's fortifications, and only 310 laborers were ever paid. It is free. Spend the night in Nashville.

This is a Saturday. Drive 13 miles and about 25 minutes east on US 70 to Andrew Jackson's Hermitage. Jackson bought it in 1804 as a 425-acre farm and made it a cotton plantation. He enslaved ten people when he moved here, 95 when he was elected president in 1828 and about 150 when he died in 1845, and across 77 years the family enslaved at least 325 people on this and other properties. Alfred Jackson, a formerly enslaved man, farmed Hermitage land after emancipation and told visitors stories until his death in 1901; his cabin is where the enslaved-life tour begins. The Enslaved Cemetery lies a quarter mile from the quarters, with a limestone marker at each known grave. General admission was $29.95 and the In Their Footsteps tour $49.95. Then take I-40 east 71 miles and about an hour and a half to the Cookeville Depot Museum. The brick depot of 1909 was built for the Tennessee Central Railroad, whose line gave Upper Cumberland farmers markets in Nashville and Knoxville; its builder, Jere Baxter, saved money by using convict labor. Passenger service ended in 1955, and the city bought and restored the depot in 1975. Check the museum for hours. Drive 40 miles and 50 minutes to the Cumberland Homesteads, where in 1934 the New Deal put unemployed miners and timber hands on small farms in houses of local Crab Orchard sandstone, with a cooperative store and factories. Critics hated it, the cooperatives failed, and the farms were too small and the soil too poor to pay, so men left for jobs in Detroit, Akron and Dayton. Check the Homesteads Tower Association for tower museum hours. Then drive 74 miles and about an hour and a half on I-40 to Knoxville. The Beck Cultural Exchange Center at 1927 Dandridge Avenue keeps the history of Knoxville's Black community in one place, in a house of 1912 the community bought in 1975, and it closes at 6 on Saturday. Spend the night in Knoxville.

This is a Sunday. Drive 38 miles and about an hour from Knoxville to the Townsend end of Laurel Creek Road, then eight more miles to Cades Cove, the limestone valley the Cherokee called Tsiyahi, "otter place." An eleven-mile one-way loop road circles it past log houses, barns, three churches and a gristmill, and the park says to allow two to four hours. John Oliver settled in the fall of 1818, and by 1850 the cove held 685 people. The park ended that life: Tennessee and North Carolina began buying land in 1927, and John W. Oliver, the first settler's grandson, fought the taking and lost on his third appeal to the Tennessee Supreme Court. The cabins, mill and churches survive because the park kept them, and most of the families who built them did not stay. The loop is open from sunrise to sunset, and a Sunday avoids the Wednesday closure to cars. Leave by Laurel Creek Road and take Little River Road east about 23 miles and an hour to Sugarlands, then US 441 up 13 miles to Newfound Gap at 5,046 feet. The Tennessee and North Carolina line crosses the pass, and the Appalachian Trail crosses the road at the top. Indian Gap, two miles west and named for an old Cherokee trail, was long thought to be the lowest crossing until Arnold Guyot found this one lower. The terraced memorial beside the lot honors Laura Spelman Rockefeller, whose son gave the last $5 million toward the park's land purchases in 1928, and Franklin Roosevelt dedicated the park here on September 2, 1940. More than 4,000 residents had to leave the land that became the park. Kuwohi, the park's highest peak at 6,643 feet, rises farther along the ridge; its Cherokee name means "mulberry place," and for more than 160 years it was called Clingmans Dome, after Thomas Clingman, who later became a Confederate general, until the Cherokee name was restored in September 2024. The trip ends here, and Cherokee, North Carolina, lies down the far side.