Mount Locust Inn: Seventeen Seventy-Nine, the Last Trace Tavern Standing

Mount Locust was built as a plantation in seventeen seventy-nine, when the Natchez district was still Spanish colonial territory. The first owner was a man named William Ferguson, and by the time the plantation changed hands and was converted for traveler use around eighteen ten, the road it sat beside had become the most important overland route in the young American republic.

Between approximately eighteen hundred and eighteen twenty, an estimated ten thousand people per year traveled the Natchez Trace northbound. They were mostly flatboat men, merchants who had floated goods down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to sell in New Orleans or Natchez, then sold their boats as well because boats were cheap and the river was too dangerous to row against. They walked home with their earnings. The walk from Natchez to Nashville was approximately four hundred forty-four miles.

At intervals along the Trace, establishments called stands offered shelter, food, and sometimes whiskey. Most of them were rough affairs, a log structure and a spring, with prices calibrated to travelers who had cash and few alternatives. Mount Locust charged a dollar and a quarter per night by some accounts, which was the cost of reasonable lodging in the early eighteen hundreds.

Every other stand on the Natchez Trace is gone. Mount Locust is the only one remaining. It is now a unit of the National Park Service, open seasonally, and rangers give interpretive talks in the restored structure. When you stand inside it, you are standing in the only surviving shelter from the era when this road carried the republic's commerce on foot. The highway past the front door is four hundred years newer than the path it follows.