Tishomingo State Park: Stone, Creek, and the CCC

Mississippi is mostly flat. Tishomingo State Park is the exception. A rugged wedge of sandstone bluffs, tumbling creek beds, and Appalachian foothills geology that feels borrowed from a different state entirely. It sits in the far northeast corner of Mississippi, near the Alabama line, and it carries a landscape and a history that most of the state simply does not have.

The park is named for a Chickasaw warrior-diplomat, Chief Tishomingo, whose name in the Chickasaw language means something close to assistant chief, though the title carried the weight of a great warrior and orator. Tishomingo served with United States forces in the Northwest Territory under General Anthony Wayne and later in the War of eighteen twelve. He received a silver medal from President George Washington, signed major Chickasaw treaties in eighteen sixteen and eighteen eighteen, and was present at the Treaty of Pontotoc in eighteen thirty-two, the agreement that ceded the last of the Chickasaw homeland in Mississippi. He died in eighteen thirty-eight, in the Choctaw Nation's territory, after the forced removal west had already begun.

The park's terrain had been quarried for its native stone in the early nineteen hundreds by the North Mississippi Traction Company, which had planned to dam Bear Creek for a railroad power line. That scheme never came to pass. Instead, Tishomingo County bought the land from area farmers at six dollars an acre in nineteen thirty-five and deeded it to the state.

What transformed the land was the Civilian Conservation Corps. Two hundred young men, paid thirty dollars a month with twenty-five of it sent home to their Depression-era families, built everything here: the entrance road, walking trails, cabins, a dam for the lake, the lodge, and the stone retaining walls, culverts, steps, and water fountains that still stand today. Every major structure in the park carries the handwork of men who needed a job during the worst economic collapse in American history. The Army oversaw the camp; the National Park Service directed the projects. The result is one of the finest examples of CCC craftsmanship in Mississippi. Stone meeting water meeting woods in a landscape that does not look like Mississippi at all.