The Natchez Trace Scenic Parkway which commemorates the most significant highway of the Old Southwest. leads you 444 miles through three states between Natchez, Mississippi, and Nashville, Tennessee. I drove the south 60 miles or so up to Jackson, Mississippi. I was in good company; General Andrew Jackson, Jefferson Davis, James Audubon, Meriwether Lewis (who died on the Trace in 1809) and Ulysses S. Grant (and presumably a few women, too) traveled the Natchez trace before I got there.
I stopped at the Emerald Mound on the advice of a young Southern gentleman leading tours at the Longwood Plantation. The Natchez and their ancestors built and used this eight-acre ceremonial mound between 1200 and 1730.
Along the Trace I stopped at Mount Locust, a restored, historic inn.
By 1785, an increasing number of boatmen known as "Kaintucks" were floating flatboats down the Mississippi River to sell their goods at the markets in Natchez and New Orleans. Without an efficient way to navigate up the Mississippi River, the boatmen walked north on the Natchez Trace to make their way home. A day’s walk from Natchez brought the Kaintucks and their gold to Mount Locust.
Not exactly the amenities of the Hilton.
I enjoyed driving the Trace, but was ready to get up to Vicksburg, standing on a high bluff overlooking a bend in the Mississippi River. Vicksburg's strategic location made it a prime target during the Civil War. As Union troops worked their way northward from the Gulf of Mexico and south from Illinois, overpowering Confederate defenses one by one, Vicksburg came to be the final Confederate stronghold, surrendering July 4, 1863.
Winning Vicksburg was the key to Union victory and resulted in a siege lasting 47 days. The first metal-plated steam-powered navy boats commissioned by the Union controlled the Mississippi River. Recently one was recovered from the river and restored to view.
During the siege, citizens resorted to eating rats and printing the newspaper on the back of wallpaper. The deprivation and defeat is still painfully recalled in the local collective memory; the fourth of July wasn't celebrated in Vicksburg until the 1940s.
From the visitor center I drove 8 miles of a 16 mile driving tour through the rolling wooded hills with historic markers explaining and recounting key events in the campaign.
This is what remains of the Union's iron-clad gunboat, the USS Cairo, sunk in the Yazoo River by an electrically detonated mine -- the first boat in history to be sunk in this way.
That gunboat is something else! Wish I could be there to learn all about it with you! xo
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