Shiloh & the Tennessee River

A 4,000-acre bottomland park in McNairy County built around a pond that railroad crews dug in 1853, with a 70-foot tower over Dismal Swamp and Civil War earthworks.

An 8,862-acre refuge on the Cumberland River floodplain near Dover, made in 1962 to replace habitat Lake Barkley flooded, wintering tens of thousands of waterfowl.

A New Deal state park built on worn-out West Tennessee farmland, where the Fairfield Gullies show what erosion did and kudzu was planted to stop it.

A Perry County state park on the Tennessee River where a leather-shipping landing once stood, with ruins of its pier and blacksmith shop, a historic landing trail and quiet water trails.

A state park beside TVA's Pickwick Landing Dam, a few miles north of the Mississippi and Alabama lines, with a lodge, marina, golf course, aviary and the lake the 1938 dam made.

The earthen fort above the Cumberland River where Grant's demand for unconditional surrender ended the February 1862 siege, with the Dover Hotel, a national cemetery and the story of the freedom seekers who came to the lines.

A Tennessee River park on the site of a Union supply depot shelled in November 1864 and of the town later drowned by Kentucky Lake, with earthworks, a railroad bed and an African American cemetery.

The place on the Natchez Trace Parkway where Meriwether Lewis died in October 1809, with his 1848 monument, a pioneer cemetery, a walk on the Old Trace and a free campground.

A National Historic Landmark on the Tennessee River bluff: the remains of a palisaded Mississippian-era town with seven mounds and the visible rings of its house sites, inside Shiloh National Military Park.

The April 6-7, 1862 battlefield above Pittsburg Landing on the Tennessee River, with the Hornets' Nest, Bloody Pond, a national cemetery and no entrance fee.

A small museum in Savannah's 1939 post office with the Shiloh effigy pipe, a Trail of Tears river-crossing exhibit, a gunport replica from the USS Cairo and the largest petrified wood in the state.

A limestone iron furnace built in 1854 at the Tennessee end of Land Between the Lakes, run with enslaved labor and closed within two years, the last real trace of the town of Model.