Gaines Trace

The trace was a border before it was a road. Edmund P. Gaines surveyed the Tennessee River to Cotton Gin Port section in 1807 and 1808, and the road itself was built in 1811 and 1812. By 1816 the Gaines Trace and the Tombigbee marked the line between the United States and Chickasaw territory in Mississippi. Smithville grew along it. On April 27, 2011, an EF5 tornado destroyed city hall, the post office and four of five churches; a memorial reference counts sixteen dead in the town, twenty-three along the storm's path.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Elvis Presley Birthplace — 21 mi
  The two-room house in East Tupelo where Elvis Presley was born in 1935, with a museum and the church building the family attended, set near the vanished Black neighborhoods where he first heard the blues.
• Tupelo National Battlefield — 24 mi
  A one-acre park on Main Street marking the July 1864 battle of Tupelo, a Union victory that kept Nathan Bedford Forrest away from Sherman's supply line, with Black soldiers among the defenders.
• Chickasaw Village Site — 25 mi
  A Chickasaw village on a remnant of the Black Belt Prairie beside the Natchez Trace Parkway, with house outlines marked on the ground and signs that speak in Chickasaw voices.
• Chickasaw Council House — 25 mi
  A roadside exhibit on the Natchez Trace Parkway marking the Chickasaw capital of the 1820s and the council house where the 1832 treaty of Pontotoc Creek ended Chickasaw title to Mississippi.

More markers nearby

• Chickasaw Cession — 7.4 mi
• Amory, Mississippi: Blues from a Railroad Town — 8.1 mi
• Van Buren — 8.3 mi
• Cotton Gin Port — 10 mi