This is Part 4 of our Alabama/Mississippi tour. Check out Part 3 here.
There are three national parks with Natchez in the title. So, starting with what Natchez is will be a good first step. Natchez is a city in southwestern Mississippi, located on the Mississippi River, just across from Louisiana. The city gets its name from the Natchez, a Native American group that shares a long history in this area, and I will admit to not knowing a lot of it. (You can read more about them here.)
Two of the three national parks also share the name Natchez Trace, a trace here meaning a path or a road. This particular historical path (more accurately, a network of paths) stretched from modern-day Nashville, Tennessee to Natchez, Mississippi. Originally travelled by the Native Americans, it was also traveled by early American settlers.
Specifically, ‘Kaintucks’, or farmers from the Ohio River Valley, would use the trace to head back home after floating their goods down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. With the arrival of the steamboat in the early 19th century, upriver travel became more efficient, and thus, the trace was not travelled as widely.
Due to the geology of this area, many historical sections of this trace exist, though within deeply sunken areas. You can still walk within these paths, and it is interesting to imagine the centuries’ worth of footsteps that have been right where you are.
The Natchez Trace National Scenic Trail (NST) is not one continuous trail from Natchez to Nashville. (The Parkway serves this purpose now.). The NST, however, is made up of sixty miles of trails in various areas located near the Parkway, intended for horseback riding and/or hiking.
Part of the NST is located near Madison, MS, to the northeast of Jackson, where we were staying. The first two pictures above within the Old Trace (which are located between Jackson and Natchez) are not technically part of the NST, so on June 14, we took advantage of the West Florida Boundary Trailhead near Madison to make our claim that we had set foot in the NST.
We didn’t want to hike too much throughout the Trace, as most everything that I saw online talked about the prevalence of ticks. Tiffany is holding Sage in that first picture also because of the amount of poison ivy we saw. We were on vacation, so we didn’t want any critters or rashes to get in the way!
So, we headed to the trailhead, hiked a few yards in, paid our respects, then headed out.
Click below for a couple of other pictures centered around the Old Trace. On the 15th, we drove the Parkway down to Natchez, where we learned about other aspects of this area. Check out our write-up to learn about the Parkway itself and what else we learned, saw, and did.
Beavers in the Park 