Tupelo & the Golden Triangle

A Civilian Conservation Corps park around Bear Creek's sandstone canyon at milepost 304 of the Natchez Trace Parkway, with a swinging bridge and cliffs found nowhere else in Mississippi.

The crossroads where Nathan Bedford Forrest routed a larger Union force in June 1864, and where Black regiments, many raised at Corinth, held the bridge that let most of the army escape.

A roadside exhibit on the Natchez Trace Parkway marking the Chickasaw capital of the 1820s and the council house where the 1832 treaty of Pontotoc Creek ended Chickasaw title to Mississippi.

A Chickasaw village on a remnant of the Black Belt Prairie beside the Natchez Trace Parkway, with house outlines marked on the ground and signs that speak in Chickasaw voices.

A Park Service center at Battery Robinett telling why two railroads made Corinth a prize, from the siege of 1862 to the battle of October, and what happened to the people who sought freedom there.

The site of a Union-run town of freedom seekers in 1862 and 1863, with a quarter-mile walkway of life-size bronze figures and the origin of a Black regiment that fought at Brices Cross Roads.

A one-acre park on Main Street marking the July 1864 battle of Tupelo, a Union victory that kept Nathan Bedford Forrest away from Sherman's supply line, with Black soldiers among the defenders.

The two-room house in East Tupelo where Elvis Presley was born in 1935, with a museum and the church building the family attended, set near the vanished Black neighborhoods where he first heard the blues.

A Mississippi Blues Trail marker and granite memorial on East Broad Street honoring Chester Burnett, who was born nearby in 1910 and became the Chicago blues giant Howlin' Wolf.

The parkway's headquarters and official visitor center near Tupelo, with a film, a small museum of the Old Trace and the surviving New Deal houses of the Tupelo Homesteads.

The 1875 Episcopal rectory where Tennessee Williams was born in 1911, moved to Main Street in the 1990s and now Columbus's welcome center and a National Literary Landmark.

A National Historic Landmark mansion above the Tombigbee River, home of a plantation family that enslaved more than a hundred people, left empty for half a century before a family restored it.