Mississippi History Along the Natchez Trace

The past presses in

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Mississippi has produced some of America’s best literature and music but has still not recovered its reputation from its time as the locus of some of the most ferocious resistance to the civil rights movement. Mississippi is rich in history, natural beauty, and the proud and pretty little towns that can make a road trip an adventure and a joy; it is far less rich in actual money. It is, in many ways, a microcosm and shorthand for the entire South; the region’s complex history and distinct culture seem amplified there, and much of it is on view along the Natchez Trace Parkway.

The old Natchez Trace was an artery of Native American travel and commerce. As the area came under American control, it became a route for missionaries, explorers, and settlers—all those intent on laying up their treasures, either in this world or the next. The Trace served as a major thoroughfare for a few decades during early colonization before being eclipsed by other roads and the development of shipping and transit ports along the Mississippi, fading into relative obscurity (though local people still used some sections) until the 1930s, when the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration began building a highway that roughly followed the old route. The Natchez Trace Parkway is now under the control of the National Parks Service (NPS), which maintains the highway as well as several adjacent, hikeable sections of the original trail.

The parkway begins just south of Nashville, taking a quick bite out of Alabama before sprawling diagonally down Mississippi to terminate outside Natchez. My camping buddy and I decided to start in Tupelo; we found a campground at Trace State Park, set up camp, and turned in early to get a jump on the next day.

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Diner breakfast is an important part of any road trip, and Shockley’s in Tupelo delivered; they brought me a bowl of sausage gravy, which I needed to combat my faint applejack-by-the-campfire hangover. Fortified, we began our trip down the Trace. The park service bills the Natchez Trace Parkway as a drive through history, and there’s a marker every few miles. Most of these are not really engrossing by themselves; as road-trip veterans will know, many of them vaguely mark a location where a native settlement or some skirmish or other probably happened. Cumulatively, though, they provide a sense of the sweep of history. From our perch on the far side of America’s rise to superpower status, we forget how quickly the country developed. Someone who took part in the American settlement of Mississippi and who was a young adult at statehood in 1817 might well have lived long enough to see the Native Americans cleared out and the Old South rise and fall within a human lifetime.

That night, we set up camp at Rocky Springs, a free campground on the parkway maintained by the NPS. I harrumphed at the National Parks Service in my last column, about Fort Jackson and its proposed takeover by the NPS. While I stand by my harrumph, I will say that the agency has done a wonderful job on the Natchez Trace Parkway. There are historical markers everywhere, excellent signage, glass-smooth roads, well-stewarded nature and historical sites, and wheelchair ramps. Rocky Springs itself is a ghost town accessible by road from the campsite; apparently, it had been a bustling community until being ravaged by erosion, disease, and war, with the arrival of boll weevils delivering the cotton-killing blow. After exploring the town, we noted that no sign expressly forbade us to drink beer in the woods, so we did, eventually developing a friendly if distant relationship with a bold raccoon who ate our egg shells out of the fire pit.

Rocky Springs is an excellent home base for exploring the lower third of the Trace. It’s a short drive and marginal detour off the trace itself to visit Vicksburg, a town I’d wanted to see since I was a child and heard described by my grandparents. Vicksburg National Military Park is stirring, gorgeous, and excellently curated—by luck, we were there on July 3rd, the 153rd anniversary of the end of fighting. (Grant waited until the next day to take possession of the city, for obvious reasons.) Demonstration cannons whumped as we drove the long loop around the city where the battle lines had been drawn. Afterward, wanting to postpone our return to camp until the day had cooled a little, we stopped at one of the several casinos in town, where my friend won sixty dollars and I managed to cap my losses at $20, which is its own victory in a way. 

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Vicksburg is the heaviest-hitting historical site in the general area of the Trace but far from the only one. Several examples of Native American mounds dot the route. These massive ceremonial structures frankly look like little hills at a glance, but when you’re told they’re human-made, you realize their sophistication—a mere pile of dirt would have washed away by now, but these mounds have outlived their creators, and in most cases, the explanation of why they were built. 

The general aura of vanished worlds is continued at the Windsor Ruins. The elegant Windsor plantation house survived the Civil War only to fall prey to a fire started by a dropped cigarette in 1890; now, all that stands on the site are twenty-three huge and ornate Corinthian columns, bare against the trees and sky. 

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The past presses in even closer down the road, in the ghost town of Rodney; this riverside town found itself stranded when the fickle Mississippi River changed course shortly after the Civil War. It was almost wholly abandoned after the railroad was built through nearby Fayette. 

I’ve seen Mississippi now. White gravy flows like water and the smiles are wider than anywhere else; I was called “honey” and “sugar” more times in three days than in the preceding thirty-one years. History crowds in on you; every town of any size we stopped in had been the site of a battle. There’s a deep pride and sense of place; the only inhabited house in Rodney had a freshly mown lawn and bright bunting for the Fourth of July, and the sign welcoming us to Port Gibson quoted, of all people, Ulysses S. Grant, who apparently said the town was too pretty to burn. The overall experience was of exploration, of learning about a place like, but distinct from, the one I’d grown up in. Texas has myths; Louisiana has legends; but in rural, lush, fertile Mississippi, stories grow especially well. 

For another trip down a trail, read Rick Arnett's December 2012 piece, "Biking the Natchez Trace."