The Natchez Trace Parkway Visitor Center at milepost 266 is the parkway's headquarters, and the best place to learn what the road is for. A ranger desk hands out maps, a short film introduces the route, and a small museum covers the Old Trace, which tribes from the Great Lakes to the Gulf used as a trading corridor. The two-lane parkway runs 444 miles to Natchez. Congress authorized it in 1938, work paused during the Second World War, and the last sections opened on 21 May 2005.
Behind the headquarters buildings stand the survivors of the Tupelo Homesteads, a New Deal experiment of twenty-five houses, each on about three acres with a cow, pigs, chickens and a pressure canner, meant to let families feed themselves and work for wages part time. The first residents moved in on 16 November 1934, and Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt visited two days later. None of the homesteaders chose to buy, the project passed through several agencies, and the houses became the parkway's. The houses look much as they did in the 1930s.
Use the center as a starting point. Rangers here give directions for Tupelo National Battlefield and Brices Cross Roads, the Chickasaw Village Site lies four miles south, and the Chickasaw Council House fifteen miles south.
The closest stops worth working into your route