Fort Pickering

Memphis kept building the same fort. The first was a frontier post and trading station dating to 1798. Meriwether Lewis stopped there in September 1809, arriving on the 15th and leaving on the 29th, and he borrowed money from Major Gilbert Russell before taking the Natchez Trace, where he died on October 11. Confederate soldiers later cut the Civil War works into the top of an old mound, and after Union forces took Memphis in June 1862 the fort stretched nearly two miles along the bluffs with 55 guns. It was demolished in 1866.

What the plaque says

Fort Pickering Around 1800, near the current site of the Memphis-Arkansas Bridge, Capt. Zebulon Pike established this U. S. Army fort, named for Secretary of War Timothy Pickering. It remained as an Indian trading post until the end of the War of 1812. During the Civil War, the Union Army constructed a large earthwork fort with the same name, stretching along the bluffs from Beale Street to DeSoto Park.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• 1866 Memphis Massacre Marker at Army Park — 1.1 mi
  A privately funded NAACP marker in a small downtown park, placed in 2016, that names the May 1866 attack on Black South Memphis as a massacre.
• National Civil Rights Museum — 1.1 mi
  The Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King Jr. was killed on April 4, 1968, kept as a museum of the civil rights movement from the nineteenth century to today.
• Beale Street — 1.6 mi
  The street that became the center of Black Memphis after the Civil War, home to Church's Park, W. C. Handy, Ida B. Wells and the blues, now a National Historic Landmark district.
• Sun Studio — 2.2 mi
  The small Union Avenue room where Sam Phillips recorded Rocket 88, Howlin' Wolf, Elvis Presley and the Million Dollar Quartet, now a National Historic Landmark.

More markers nearby

• Memphis Martyrs — 0.3 mi
• WLOK Radio Station — 1.2 mi
• John James Audubon — 1.3 mi
• Bishop Charles Harrison Mason — 1.4 mi