The Great River Road in Tennessee: Memphis to Reelfoot Lake
About 112 miles of the Great River Road in Tennessee, from Graceland and downtown Memphis north on US 51 and TN 78 past Henning and Tiptonville to Reelfoot Lake.
The Route at a Glance
The Great River Road follows the Mississippi through ten states, from Lake Itasca in Minnesota to the Gulf, marked by green and white pilot's wheel signs. In Tennessee it runs down the state's western edge: from Reelfoot Lake in the northwest corner, Tennessee 78 leads south to US 51 at Dyersburg, and US 51 carries on to Memphis. This drive takes 112 miles of it in the other direction, about two and three-quarter hours without stops, from Graceland in Memphis north to Reelfoot Lake State Park. Memphis & West Tennessee and Reelfoot Lake & Northwest Tennessee cover the country. All of it was Chickasaw (Chikasha) hunting ground. Historians say Andrew Jackson and the other commissioners used threats, economic coercion and bribery to take nearly 20 million acres in the treaties of 1805, 1816 and 1818, and the Jackson Purchase of 1818 ended every remaining Chickasaw claim in Tennessee. Most of the Chickasaw crossed the Mississippi in 1837 and 1838, after great suffering.
The drive begins on Elvis Presley Boulevard, which is US 51, at Graceland, a ticketed tour of a 1939 mansion on a commercial campus. The sound itself came out of Sun Studio and the Black music of Beale Street. About seven road miles west, off Tennessee 61, the C.H. Nash Museum at Chucalissa stands on a Mississippian town first settled around 1000 CE. Its name is Chickasaw for "abandoned house," and the museum acknowledges the ground as Chickasaw homeland, also the country of the Choctaw and Quapaw Nations. In 1854 the bottomland was bought as a cotton plantation with nineteen enslaved people.
Back on the road, the Stax Museum of American Soul Music stands on East McLemore Avenue, where the company was racially integrated when Memphis was not. Elmwood Cemetery opened in 1852 and holds the whole of Memphis: Confederate officers and a slave trader, and also Robert R. Church Sr., the freedman who built Church's Park on Beale Street, and the civil rights leader Maxine Smith. Sun Studio is where Sam Phillips recorded Jackie Brenston's "Rocket 88" in 1951. Downtown, the National Civil Rights Museum keeps part of the Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King Jr. was shot on April 4, 1968. A block away the marker at Army Park records the three days in May 1866 when white mobs attacked the Black neighborhoods of South Memphis: forty-six Black people and two white people died, and no one was ever prosecuted. Beale Street is best by day, for the markers and Beale Street Baptist Church of 1864, the oldest surviving Black church building in Tennessee. After a mob killed her friend Thomas Moss and two other men in March 1892, Ida B. Wells, who co-edited the Free Speech and Headlight from that church, began her investigation of lynching.
North of the city US 51 runs past Millington and Covington to Henning, about 56 miles from the start, where the Alex Haley House Museum stands in the bungalow that Will and Cynthia Palmer built in 1918 and 1919. Alex Haley lived here from 1921 to 1929 and heard on the porch the family stories that became Roots in 1976. The book has been questioned: Haley settled a plagiarism suit in 1978, and genealogists have found that the written records do not support the line of descent he described. Fort Pillow State Historic Park lies about 22 road miles west of Henning on Tennessee 87 and is not on this road. There, on April 12, 1864, about 1,500 Confederate cavalrymen under Major General Nathan Bedford Forrest attacked a garrison of roughly 600, about half of them Black soldiers of the United States Colored Troops. Many men were shot or bayoneted as they tried to surrender or flee. Survivors, a congressional committee and most historians since have called it a massacre.
US 51 continues past Ripley and Halls to Dyersburg, and Tennessee 78 leads north from there. It is a Tennessee Scenic Parkway from Dyersburg to Tiptonville, descends the first Chickasaw Bluff near Bogota and crosses low bottomland. The Carl Perkins Visitors Center in Tiptonville is a refurbished caboose for the son of sharecroppers, born there on April 9, 1932, who grew up hearing gospel and blues in the cotton rows. Four miles north, a state marker for Island No. 10 stands at Highway 22 and New Markham Road. The island has been eroded away; it fell on April 7, 1862, after three weeks of shelling by Union gunboats. Contemporary newspapers also reported that in March 1901 a mob of white townsmen lynched Ike Fitzgerald, a Black man, in Tiptonville.
The drive ends at Reelfoot Lake State Park on Highway 21. The lake exists because the 1811-12 New Madrid earthquakes dropped this corner of Tennessee and flooded it, and the tale of a Chickasaw chief named Reelfoot is legend. After a man claiming to own the lake announced in 1899 that he would drain it, masked Night Riders burned fish docks in 1908 and hanged and shot the lawyer Quentin Rankin at Walnut Log. Across the state line in Kentucky they murdered Dave Walker and members of his Black family, a baby among them, and no one was prosecuted for those killings. The Tennessee Supreme Court overturned the verdicts against six Night Riders in 1909, and the state took title to the lake in 1914. The park has a cypress boardwalk behind the visitor center, a free museum and eagle tours in January and February. The Reelfoot National Wildlife Refuge, about 12 road miles east around the lake, has its own visitor center and a 3.5-mile auto tour.
The Drive, Stop by Stop
12 stops along the route, in driving order from Graceland, Elvis Presley Boulevard (US 51), Memphis, Tennessee to Reelfoot Lake State Park, Tiptonville, Tennessee. 2 of them sit off the road itself — the distance is noted on each.
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That's the drive. Take your time, pull over often, and let The Great River Road in Tennessee: Memphis to Reelfoot Lake do what it does best.
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