C.H. Nash Museum at Chucalissa

Chucalissa is a Mississippian town on a bluff above the Mississippi River, first settled around 1000 CE and abandoned and resettled several times. The last and largest town, from the Walls Phase, raised big mounds around a central plaza and had a ball field. The town's trade reached from the Natchez area to western Kentucky and Illinois. They had left before Hernando de Soto crossed the river in 1541. The name is Chickasaw for "abandoned house." The museum acknowledges this as Chickasaw homeland, also the country of the Choctaw and Quapaw Nations before their removal.

The ground has a second history. In 1854 the bottomland was bought as a cotton plantation, and nineteen enslaved people were purchased with the land, its buildings and some animals. They were freed during the Civil War, and what became of them is not known, though many local Black families stayed on as sharecroppers. In the 1930s the state bought the land for a park for Black residents, the Jim Crow counterpart of a whites-only forest park, and Civilian Conservation Corps workers preparing a swimming area found the mounds. That park became T. O. Fuller State Park.

The C.H. Nash Museum opened in 1956, and the University of Memphis has run the site since 1962. It was named a National Historic Landmark in 1994. A replica house shows how a family lived, a gallery holds the finds, and a nature trail covers plants Native people used. It is a working teaching site with a hands-on archaeology lab, so ask what the students are digging.