The Natchez Trace Parkway in Mississippi: Natchez to the Alabama Line
About 310 miles of the Natchez Trace Parkway in Mississippi, from Natchez past Emerald Mound, Mount Locust, Ridgeland and Tupelo to Tishomingo and the Alabama line.
The Route at a Glance
The Natchez Trace Parkway runs 444 miles from Natchez, Mississippi, to a few miles south of Nashville, Tennessee, and the National Park Service calls it an All-American Road. About 310 miles of it lie in Mississippi, from Liberty Road in Natchez to the Alabama line, and this drive takes all of them: a little under eight hours without stops, at 50 miles an hour on most of the road, with no commercial vehicles and no entrance fee. Natchez & Southwest Mississippi, Jackson & Vicksburg and Tupelo & the Golden Triangle cover the country. The Old Trace joined the Natchez, Choctaw and Chickasaw nations long before it carried traders, and the parkway that Congress authorized in 1938 follows ground those nations held.
The parkway begins at Liberty Road, and Forks of the Road stands a mile from it, at the corner of Liberty Road and D'Evereux Drive. Between 1832 and 1863 Natchez held the second busiest slave market in the Deep South there, and tens of thousands of enslaved people were brought from Virginia, Maryland, Kentucky and the Carolinas. In the fall of 1863 men of the 12th Wisconsin Infantry and the 58th United States Colored Troops tore the pens down for lumber. The Grand Village of the Natchez Indians was the Natchez nation's main ceremonial center from 1682 to 1730, when the French drove the Natchez out of their homeland. Natchez descendants are enrolled today in the Cherokee Nation and the Muscogee (Creek) Nation.
At milepost 10.3 a side road runs almost a mile to Emerald Mound, the second-largest Mississippian ceremonial mound in the United States, eight acres and about 60 feet high with the two smaller mounds on top. Plaquemine people built it between roughly 1250 and 1600, and the Natchez, their descendants, still used it as a main ceremonial center in the later 1600s. Tribes associated with the site asked that the public stay off the top because the mound is sacred, and the parkway took out the stairs in 2017. Mount Locust, at milepost 15.5, was a stand, a crude inn, on the walking road home for the Kaintucks, the boatmen who sold their flatboats downriver between 1785 and 1820 and walked north. The Park Service also describes the Trace as a road used by slave traders. A cemetery behind the house holds 43 enslaved people, and Thomas Jefferson Chamberlain, who owned the place, listed 72 enslaved people in the 1860 census.
Near Ridgeland the stops come close together, between mileposts 102.4 and 106.9 (Natchez Trace Parkway at Ridgeland): an information cabin of 1951, a short walk on the Old Trace itself, a reservoir overlook, and the Boyd Site, mounds the Park Service calls sacred to the Choctaw and other tribal nations. The Choctaw town of Chisha Foka stood where Jackson is today. The 1830 Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek forced the Choctaw to give up all their land east of the Mississippi, and the removal that followed killed an estimated 2,500 people from starvation and exposure. The Trail of Tears crosses the parkway at four places.
The next 145 miles cross the middle of the state with pull-offs and trails and no stop in this guide, until Pontotoc County. At milepost 251.1 the Chickasaw Council House site marks Pontatock, the Chickasaw capital of the 1820s. The treaty of Pontotoc Creek, signed on 20 October 1832, ended Chickasaw title to their lands in Mississippi and Alabama, and the nation had to pay for its own removal. A large party left Memphis on 4 July 1838, and many died on the way west. Nothing of the council house survives. Tupelo National Battlefield lies 1.2 miles east of the parkway: one acre on Main Street that marks the battle of July 1864, in which the 61st and 68th United States Colored Troops were among the units that held. At milepost 261.8 the Chickasaw Village Site has house outlines marked on a remnant of the Black Belt Prairie, with park service audio in the voices of LaDonna Brown, tribal anthropologist of the Chickasaw Nation, and Pauline Brown of the Chickasaw Language Committee. The Parkway Visitor Center at milepost 266 is the headquarters, and behind it stand the surviving Tupelo Homesteads, New Deal houses first occupied in 1934.
The drive ends near the Alabama line at Tishomingo State Park, milepost 304, where Bear Creek has cut a sandstone canyon. The Civilian Conservation Corps built the park between 1935 and 1939, and the park and the county take their names from Tishomingo, a Chickasaw leader.
The Drive, Stop by Stop
10 stops along the route, in driving order from Liberty Road, Natchez, Mississippi to Mississippi-Alabama line, near Tishomingo, Mississippi.
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That's the drive. Take your time, pull over often, and let The Natchez Trace Parkway in Mississippi: Natchez to the Alabama Line do what it does best.
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