Military Road

Soldiers did the digging. The First and Eighth Infantry and an artillery detachment built this road between 1817 and 1820, about 75,801 man-days of labor, across country that had been Choctaw Nation land. Their route crossed the Tombigbee at Columbus and then fought the swamps of Noxubee County, where causeways were the hardest work. By 1824 a newspaper counted 516 miles to New Orleans, some 200 miles shorter than the Natchez Trace, with 35 bridges and 20,000 feet of causeway. Disrepair and flooded ground wore it down in the 1840s, and the Robinson Road largely took its traffic.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Tennessee Williams Welcome Center — 1.0 mi
  The 1875 Episcopal rectory where Tennessee Williams was born in 1911, moved to Main Street in the 1990s and now Columbus's welcome center and a National Literary Landmark.
• Waverley Mansion — 6.5 mi
  A National Historic Landmark mansion above the Tombigbee River, home of a plantation family that enslaved more than a hundred people, left empty for half a century before a family restored it.
• Howlin' Wolf Memorial and Blues Trail Marker — 15 mi
  A Mississippi Blues Trail marker and granite memorial on East Broad Street honoring Chester Burnett, who was born nearby in 1910 and became the Chicago blues giant Howlin' Wolf.
• Sam D. Hamilton Noxubee National Wildlife Refuge — 27 mi
  A 48,000-acre refuge of bottomland forest and lakes in Noxubee, Oktibbeha and Winston counties, rebuilt from worn-out farmland, with red-cockaded woodpeckers, alligators and winter eagles.

More markers nearby

• Queen City Hotel (Blues Trail) — 0.3 mi
• Missionary Union Baptist Church — 0.4 mi
• Joshua Lawrence Meador — 0.5 mi
• R.E. Hunt High School — 0.5 mi