Big Hill Pond began as a hole. In 1853 crews building the Memphis and Charleston Railroad scooped soil from this spot to raise a levee across the bottoms of the Tuscumbia River and Cypress Creek, and water filled the pit. Cypress grew up in and around it, and the park now takes in more than 4,000 acres of timber, wetland and hardwood bottom where the Tuscumbia meets the Hatchie, a state scenic river.
People were here long before the railroad. Woodland Period sites lie along the Tuscumbia and the Hatchie, and the Chickasaw lived in this country until the Jackson Purchase. The railroad made the land a military target. After the Battle of Davis Bridge in October 1862, a fight of about 18,000 men nearby, the Union army built earthworks to guard the line and manned them partly with United States Colored Troops. A portion of the battlefield, the second largest in West Tennessee, is on the National Register, and the Park Service looks after part of it as a unit of Shiloh National Military Park.
The park itself is for walking and paddling. A 70-foot observation tower looks out over Dismal Swamp, trails run through the bottoms, and 35-acre Travis McNatt Lake is open to canoes and kayaks. The state made it a park in 1973. Watch your feet: cypress knees and tree roots are the main hazards on the trails, and the park warns of falling branches and feral pigs.
The closest stops worth working into your route
Roadside plaques and monuments within a short detour