Andrew Jackson's Military Road

You are near the trace of Andrew Jackson's Military Road, one of the great early highways of the young republic. After the War of Eighteen Twelve, General Jackson wanted a faster way to move troops, artillery, and supply wagons between Nashville and New Orleans. Congress put up the first money in the spring of eighteen sixteen, and United States Army soldiers began cutting the road in the spring of eighteen seventeen.

When it was finished in May of eighteen twenty, it ran roughly five hundred sixteen miles and shaved about two hundred miles off the old route. Here it crossed the Tennessee River between Killen and Florence, at the foot of the Muscle Shoals. The mail route from New Orleans to Nashville soon moved over to it, pulling traffic away from the older Natchez Trace.