Mississippi Petrified Forest: Ancient Trees in a Cotton State
Near Jackson, Mississippi
About thirty-six miles west of Jackson, near the town of Flora, a private nature preserve protects something that seems improbable for central Mississippi: an ancient petrified forest. Thirty-six million years ago, massive trees were uprooted by floods and carried to this location, where they were buried in sediment and slowly replaced, mineral by mineral, with silica. What emerged over geological time were stone logs, some of them six feet in diameter and weighing tens of thousands of pounds, lying in the earth as if the forest had simply been pushed over and frozen.
The Mississippi Petrified Forest is one of only two petrified forests in the eastern United States, a distinction that matters because the famous petrified forests of the American West formed in entirely different geological conditions. A nature trail winds among the logs, some still buried to their midpoints, others fully exposed. The museum on site holds cut and polished samples that show the intricate wood-grain structure preserved inside the stone.
