Pocahontas Mounds

Pocahontas is a platform mound about twenty-two feet high and a separate burial mound, built and used between roughly 800 and 1300 CE by Coles Creek and Plaquemine Mississippian people. Excavation found the remains of a thatched, clay-plastered log building on the platform, possibly a temple or a chief's residence. Fragments of a bird-effigy bowl and a human-effigy pipe were found by schoolchildren at the burial mound. Excavations in 2004 for Mississippi State University's Cobb Institute, paid by the state transportation department, preceded a roadside park with interpretive signs on U.S. 49.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Tougaloo College — 8.8 mi
  A historically Black college north of Jackson, founded on a former plantation in 1869, whose students staged Mississippi's first sit-in and whose chapel hosted the movement's leaders.
• Natchez Trace Parkway at Ridgeland — 10.0 mi
  The stretch of the Natchez Trace around Ridgeland, where a worn section of the Old Trace, the Ross Barnett Reservoir and the Choctaw town of Chisha Foka share a few miles of parkway.
• Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument — 10.0 mi
  A modest ranch house in Jackson's Elraine neighborhood where Medgar Evers was shot in the driveway in 1963, now a unit of the National Park Service.
• Blue Front Cafe — 13 mi
  A cinder-block juke joint in Bentonia, opened in 1948 by Carey and Mary Holmes, home of the Bentonia school of blues and a stop on the Mississippi Blues Trail.

More markers nearby

• Flora Train Depot — 5.2 mi
• Clinton's Blues Legacy — 8.3 mi
• Cornerstone Plaza — 8.4 mi
• St. Joseph Catholic School — 8.5 mi