Selsertown: A Trace Stand Gone to Ash

Six miles from Washington, Mississippi, a man named George Selser is said to have put up an inn along the old Natchez Trace in the early eighteen hundreds. His place, known as Selsertown, became a small community where the Griffing, Coleman, and Jones families settled nearby.

The inn changed hands over the years. A later owner, reportedly Irish, hung a hand-lettered sign between two chinaberry trees advertising lodging for man and beast, with the word 'entertainment' spelled in an Irish hand. In eighteen thirteen, troops of the Natchez Expedition, marching north and already sick, are said to have made an emergency camp at Selsertown. A military hospital is said to have stood here briefly in eighteen fifteen. After the Civil War, the house and stables are said to have burned. All that remained were the charred stumps of those old chinaberry trees.