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 The Wonderful Natchez Trace Parkway In my last entry, I had just embarked on the Natchez Trace Parkway near its southern terminus, at Natchez, Mississippi. The Parkway is one of the most fascinating, unique and undiscovered highways in the U.S.
The Natchez Trace Parkway is a 500-mile long, two-lane highway that extends from Natchez up through Mississippi and on to Nashville, Tennessee. The parkway parallels the old Natchez Trace, a trail used for hundreds of years, first by Indians and later, in the 1800s, by pioneers, troops of the U.S. army and anyone else wanting to travel to the southeast. For many years before railroads or highways were built, the Natchez Trace was the only overland link between the Southern states and the Northeast.
The National Park Service manages the Natchez Trace Parkway so no commercial vehicles, including trucks, are allowed on it. In fact, there aren't any commercial facilities of any kind along its entire 500-mile length. It feels strange but wonderful to drive on a beautiful, lightly-used, two-lane highway for several hours as you travel through rural countrysides without seeing a single truck, gas station, motel, billboard, or restaurant. If you need to get gas or food, though, you can get off (and back on) the Parkway every few miles at intersections with local highways.
To top it off, there are interpretive pullouts every few miles on the Parkway with historic signs or nature walks, so you could easily spend an entire week on the Parkway traveling from Natchez to Nashville while learning about the South. And if you want to camp, there are three, free national park campgrounds along the route. What a great deal, huh?
I discovered the Natchez Trace Parkway in 1984, during my college days when I was doing a road trip through the South, but I only drove a small portion of it then. This time I wanted to drive the entire length, all the way to Nashville. Traveling on the Parkway is a tranquil journey into the past.
Above left: The Natchez Trace Parkway north of Jackson, Mississippi. There are interpretive stops like this, each marked with this type of sign, every few miles for the entire 500-mile length of the Parkway. Above center: My little ol' truck at one of the many interpretive pullouts on the Natchez Trace Parkway. Above right: The original Natchez Trace was a wide, north-south trail that had been used by Indians for hundreds of years, then white pioneers in the 1800s. There are still some sections of the original Natchez Trace, including here.
Above left: A creepy (but fascinating) abandoned cemetery at Rocky Springs, Mississippi, a ghost town along the Natchez Trace Parkway. They could've filmed the graveyard scene from "A Christmas Carol" here – except for the Spanish Moss, of course. Above center: The gravestone of a 15-year old wife. Above right: The third strange experience of my trip (along with the disappearing golf ball in San Diego and hearing distant Navajo chanting in Utah) happened here. This is a church next to the abandoned Rocky Springs cemetery in a remote area several miles from the nearest house. I distinctly heard two voices inside. But when I opened the door, the church was empty.
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