Chris Turner-Neal
A fossilized tree in Flora, Mississippi's Petrified Forest.
About 36 million years ago, a river flowed through central Mississippi. Among the flotsam and jetsam it carried were massive logs, which became buried under mud on their way downriver, possibly as part of a Red River Raft-style massive logjam, where they fossilized. There they waited for the slow processes of geology to reveal them again. By the mid-1850s, the light loess soil and red riverine soil that cover much of Mississippi had rinsed away from some of the stony logs, revealing them to human curiosity—and depredation. People came both to marvel and to nab, and many of the fossils were lost before the Schabilion family acquired the land in 1962 and began developing a protected attraction. Today, this, the only petrified forest in the eastern United States is preserved and open to visitors near the town of Flora—and well worth a detour if you’re passing through central Mississippi.
If you’re like me, you learned in school or from various dinosaur-related media that “fossils happen when living matter turns to stone over time.” I accepted this for decades before I realized it was effectively transubstantiation and that I didn’t understand the process at all. Per the National Park Service, the missing ingredient is water. After some organism dies and is covered in sediment or some other protective substance that postpones or prevents decay, water with high mineral content seeps into small cavities in the organism. The dissolved minerals ultimately crystallize, time wears away the surrounding tissues, rinse/repeat, and voila—a fossil eventually emerges. While the process seems imprecise, scientists have been able to examine ultrathin slices of fossilized trees and identify species via preserved cell structure, even designating previously known, extinct species. (One is named Florxylon—“wood from Flora”.)
[Writer Chris Turner-Neal frequently sets out on unexpected excursions in the name of experiential journalism—read here about his trips to Arkansas's diamond mine, Louisiana's nudist campground, and Mississippi's Grand Canyon.]
One of the main tricks to successfully traveling with others is triage: pick a small number of personal priorities, stick with them, and otherwise let fate and the whims of your companions reign. On a recent family trip through Mississippi, I latched onto the petrified forest like a terrier. I had been several years ago, in that gauzy, unmeasurable time called “before COVID,” and I had vague but pleasant memories of a shady walk, a respite from highway driving. I wanted to see it again, so I added it to our itinerary—a privilege of being the driver.
Flora is just far enough out to not quite feel like a suburb of Jackson—from Jackson, Vicksburg, or the Natchez Trace, it is a detour, but not an “ugh that’s going to take all day” one. The front of the gift shop/museum/visitor’s center presents a comfortably touristy face: low wooden buildings looking out over an unpaved lot are how America says “come in, pay five to ten dollars, and look at something.”
"The petrified wood is fascinating, but make time to savor the living forest, too."
The first thing you’ll see is a cross-section of a sequoia trunk, its rings labeled with momentous years in human history: while we were busy with flash-in-the-pan events like “the Battle of Hastings” and “the Civil War,” the infinitely wiser trees simply grew. Per the visitor’s guide, the main path through the “forest” runs about six blocks. It feels longer, which I mean as a compliment. If you’re traveling with someone with limited mobility or endurance, there’s a shortcut—you can walk in together, leave your companion on a benchlike log to enjoy the forest while at rest, then collect them as the path loops back toward the end—this much of the trail can be accessed in a wheelchair. The entire path is shady, with the trees creating the rare situation of “outdoors but cozy.” A trail guide comes with admission, which you can follow as closely as you want. Like most documents of this sort, there’s a scavenger-hunt quality (“Have you found number six?!”), but without it I wouldn’t have thought to look at a particular petrified chunk to see that, indeed, it does look like a frog, and I enjoyed learning that animals make little dens in the hollows of petrified logs that collapse. (Of course they do, but it’s nice to know for sure.) The petrified wood is fascinating, but make time to savor the living forest, too. Even without the fossils, the path would be an excellent nature walk.
When you return to the main building, you’ll pass through a couple of museum rooms densely packed with fossils and stones, then emerge into a vast gift shop, well-appointed for rockhounds. I’ve rarely, if ever, praised a gift shop, but the profusion of stones and fossil, from both nearby and all over the world, defies even casual browsers not pick up a souvenir.
You’ll want to remember this surprising bit of natural history in the middle of Mississippi.
