The Natchez Trace: A Road Ten Thousand Years Old

The road beneath the pavement is older than any name anyone has given it. Paleo-Indian hunters walked this corridor at the end of the last ice age, perhaps twelve thousand years ago, following game through the upland forests between the Mississippi River and the Tennessee highlands. The Choctaw and Chickasaw nations maintained it for centuries as a trade and travel route, connecting their towns across what is now Mississippi and Tennessee. By the early eighteen hundreds, American settlers had a name for it: the Natchez Trace.

The traffic in those years was unusual. Flatboat men floated goods down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to New Orleans or Natchez, sold their cargo, sold the boats themselves because wood was cheaper than the river passage back, and then walked home to Tennessee and Kentucky. Thousands of them per year in the early decades of the republic, heading north through the forest with whatever cash they had earned, sleeping at rough inns called stands, watching for robbers who knew exactly who walked the Trace and why.

Mount Locust, at mile fifteen and a half, is the only surviving stand on the entire four hundred forty-four miles. It was built as a plantation in seventeen seventy-nine and converted to serve Trace traffic by eighteen ten. When you stop there, you are standing in the last physical remnant of an economy that moved the young republic's commerce on foot.

The National Park Service now manages the Trace as a two-lane scenic parkway, no billboards, no trucks, forty miles per hour. It is simultaneously a driving road, a national park, and one of the oldest continuously traveled corridors in North America. The pavement just happens to be on top.