Mount Locust

The Natchez Trace Parkway starts in Natchez at milepost 0, and Mount Locust, at milepost 15.5, is the first historic stand a driver reaches going north. People lived here long before the inn. The Park Service reports two American Indian occupations: Coles Creek families between 600 and 800 CE, and a Plaquemine village of at least seven mostly round structures between 1000 and 1350. John Blommart began the farm around 1780, and William and Paulina Ferguson bought it in 1784 and built the house that stands now, one of the oldest buildings still standing in the region.

The Trace was a walking road. Between 1785 and 1820 boatmen called Kaintucks floated flatboats of goods down the Mississippi, sold them in Natchez and New Orleans, and walked home north. The Fergusons turned their house into a stand, a crude inn, and charged 25 cents for corn mush and milk and a place to sleep on the porch. The Parkway also describes the Trace as a road used by slave traders.

The cotton years are the longer story. Archaeologists believe twelve to sixteen cabins once stood here, with four or five people in each. A cemetery on the west side of the house holds the remains of 43 enslaved people, and the brick kiln site marks where enslaved workers made bricks for parts of the Ferguson-Chamberlain house. The family lived here for five generations, and the last Chamberlain left in 1944. Walk behind the house to the kiln and both cemeteries.