A road built by the US army in the early 19th-c to link Nashville, TN, with the then pioneer outpost of Natchez in Mississippi, 725 km/450 mi distant. The road, which follows an earlier American Indian track, was designated a national parkway in 1939.
The Natchez Trace was a 440-mile-long path extending from Natchez, Mississippi to Nashville, Tennessee, linking the Cumberland, the Tennessee and Mississippi rivers. Today, the trail has been commemorated with the 444-mile-long Natchez Trace Parkway which follows the trail's approximate path.
Origins of the Natchez Trace
The Trace, like many early footpaths, traces its beginnings to the natural wanderings of bison, deer and other game. After Native Americans first began to settle the land, they began to blaze the trail further, until it became a relatively (for the time) well-worn path traversable by horse in single-file, though it may have been traveled in part before, particularly by famed Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto.
The first recorded Caucasian to travel the Trace in its entirety was an unnamed Frenchman in 1742, who wrote of the trail and its "miserable conditions." The earliest formal usage of the trail, in fact, was for trade between those three Native American nations through which the trail passed.
Development and Disappearance of the Trace
It was not until 1801, when the United States Armed Forces began blazing the trail for use as a postal route, that major work was performed on the Trace to prepare it as a thoroughfare for travelers. Critical to the success of the Trace as a trade route were inns and trading posts, referred to at the time as "stands." For the most part, the stands developed southbound from the head of the trail in Nashville.
Many of the first settlements in Mississippi and Tennessee developed along the Natchez Trace.
By 1816, the continued development of both Memphis and Jackson's Military Road, a direct line to New Orleans, Louisiana from Nashville, began shifting trade both east and west. The Trace entered a steady decline, and as author William C. In 1830, the Trace was officially abandoned as an official road, and began to disappear back into the wilderness from whence it came.
Bushwhackers, Bibles, and Boats
Despite its brief lifespan, the Trace served an essential function in the years it was in existence. This brought all sorts of people down the Trace: itinerant preachers, highwaymen and traders were just a few.
The circuit preachers were some of the most notable of the lot. Unlike its physical development, the "spiritual development" of the Trace started from the Natchez end up: several Methodist preachers began working a circuit along the Trace as early as 1800, and claimed a membership of 1,067 Caucasians and 267 African-Americans in 1812.
The Methodists were soon joined in Natchez by other Protestant religions, including the Baptists and Presbyterians. The Presbyterians and their offshoot, the Cumberland Presbyterians, were more active than the Methodists or Baptists in procuring converts along the Trace itself, including the Native American population—the Presbyterians starting from the south, the Cumberland Presbyterians from the north.
As with much of the unsettled West, the Trace was also a hotbed for banditry. The rowdiest of them all were the Kaintucks, the wild frontiersmen from upriver who came in on the steamboats and flatboats loaded with goods, left them in Natchez in exchange for pockets full of cash, and summarily treated Natchez Under-the-Hill as what could be generously called an early 1800s Las Vegas, Nevada or Amsterdam.
Still worse dangers lurked in the wilderness outside the city boundaries on the Trace itself.
The Mystery of Meriwether Lewis
Meriwether Lewis, of the Lewis and Clark Expedition fame, met his mysterious end while traveling on the Trace.
His death went unquestioned as a suicide for many years.
In 1996 James E.
Today, Grinder's Stand and the city of Hohenwald lie in Lewis County, Tennessee.
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