From Azaleas to Zydeco: My 4,600-Mile Journey through the South

Driving the Natchez Trace Parkway

Driving the Natchez Trace Parkway If I were leaving Florence to catch a plane, I’d travel to Nashville the same way as Billy Reid does every couple of weeks. I’d start back the way I came: east on Alabama Highway 72, the famous Lee Highway, to Interstate 65, which I’d then take north to Nashville. It’s a distance of 150 miles and takes less than two and a half hours, if you’re lucky with Nashville traffic. Since I wasn’t catching a plane, I took roughly the same path Jonathan Daniels did: west toward the state of Mississippi and the Natchez Trace Parkway. Rather than fight the trucks on I-65 at seventy miles per hour, I cruised the Parkway at fifty. OK, I’m lying. I’d drive about eighty on the interstate, but on the Parkway, I could only push fifty-five. Most people believe that the Natchez Trace started as a buffalo trail. These creatures migrated from their grazing pastures in what is now central Mississippi to salt deposits in present-day central Tennessee. The local Indian tribes, the Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Natchez, followed the “traces” of these animals, creating foot paths as they traveled. The local paths developed into America’s first national “road” in the late 1700s, linking the wealthy city of Natchez to the United States. The trace was especially helpful for those frontiersmen like Abraham Lincoln who floated produce and merchandise down the Mississippi River to New Orleans. After arriving in New Orleans, they sold their flat boats for lumber and walked back home via the Natchez Trace. 168 In the early 1800s, the trace got promoted from path to postal road. General Jackson marched his army of volunteers from Tennessee down the trace to the Battle of New Orleans. By the 1820s, the importance of the trail declined as pioneers developed new roads. More importantly, the new-fangled steam boat allowed river traffic to travel upstream on the river. As a result of these two developments, the Natchez Trace became obsolete as a national road and devolved into a series of local roads. For over a hundred years the trace didn’t change much; it remained a collection of local roads. During the Great Depression, though, Congress decided to build two national parkways as public works projects. The Natchez Trace was to be one of the two. In 1939, the acting superintendent of the project wrote: Congress has authorized the construction of a parkway along the general route of the old Natchez Trace, designed for tourist and passenger car traffic. Presumably the Natchez Trace Parkway eventually will be one section of a national parkway system of arterial routes for passenger cars. A parkway is an elongated park containing a road, and a parkway as part of a comprehensive recreation and conservation program would make available to the traveler certain areas along its route of a scenic, scientific and historic importance. On the Natchez Trace Parkway historical features will be emphasized although final plans for preservation and development are far from complete. This last sentence indicating that final plans were “far from complete” was a slight understatement because the last twelve miles of parkway didn’t get finished until some sixty-six years later, in 2005. The Parkway is 444 miles from beginning to end. I was traveling about 120 of them getting to the Nashville terminus. As they say in north Alabama, “leaving out” on the Parkway, the road crosses the Tennessee River at the former Colbert Ferry. At this crossing in 1811, Mr. Colbert charged General Jackson the incredible sum of $75,000 to ferry the troops across the river to meet the British in New Orleans. Seems war profiteering has been around for a while. On the Parkway, you can go miles without seeing another car. I estimate that I drove a stretch of about thirty minutes on this weekday afternoon without seeing a car coming or going. There’s not much else on 169 the Parkway. Driving the Trace at night has been described as eerie because modern travelers are not used to the complete darkness with no light pollution. Where the roadway is not canopied by trees, wide shoulders of the right-of-way create a park-like grassy lawn. The only signs on the Parkway are mile-marker signs or Parkway signs directing you to 356 archeological sites, thirty-six...