Natchez Trace Parkway

The Natchez Trace was a footpath before it was a road, and a road long before it was a parkway. It runs about 440 miles from Natchez, Mississippi, to near Nashville, Tennessee, through country the Choctaw and Chickasaw had crossed for centuries.

In the late 1700s and early 1800s, the Trace became one of the busiest routes in the young country, and almost all the traffic went one way on foot. Farmers and boatmen from the Ohio Valley floated their goods down the Mississippi on flatboats to Natchez and New Orleans. They sold the cargo, broke up the boats for lumber, and walked or rode home up the Trace. They were known as Kaintucks, whatever state they came from.

The Trace was rough and dangerous. Travelers worried about robbers, swamps and fever. Inns called stands grew up along the route to feed and house them. Then the steamboat changed everything. Once boats could travel upriver under power, there was no reason to walk home, and by the 1820s and 1830s the Trace went quiet.

Meriwether Lewis, of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, died at one of those stands in October 1809, while traveling the Trace toward Washington. Whether he took his own life or was murdered has been argued ever since. He is buried near the spot, and a broken stone column marks the grave. He has his own section on this board.

The parkway was authorized by Congress in 1938 and built in stages by the National Park Service over many decades. It was finished in 2005. Like the Blue Ridge Parkway, it is a slow road with no commercial traffic, made for looking. This board has black-and-white photographs, drawings, maps and views of the Trace and its sites. When you look at the pictures, keep an eye out for the sunken sections of the old Trace. In places, the feet of travelers and their animals wore the path down into the soft soil, leaving a trail sunk well below the forest floor. Those stretches are the oldest thing on the route.