Jackson, MS to Natchez

What a beautiful morning.  Sky was perfectly clear with a slight breeze of the lake next to us.  We arose late and had breakfast before walking about 5 miles along the shore.  As we proceeded on the Trace this morning, we came to a ghost town from the mid eighteen hundreds.  All that is left is a Methodist Church complete with old cemetery and some traces of establishments (old safes and cisterns).  Nearly 2700 people lived there then.  Of these people 2000 were slaves.  Poor management of the land allowed for erosion and over use of the land.

From there we went on down to a place called “sunken trace”.  This was an area where the constant use of the Trace dug into the ground.  The depth was about 15 feet.  For those of us in Tennessee, it was like being in a big “wash or ravine”.

Our next stop was a couple of miles off the Trace in a town called Lorman.  This was our lunch stop.  It was in an old country store that had been converted into a restaurant.  I saw this while watching Alton Brown on the “Food Channel”.  The “Country Store” is billed as the best fried chicken anywhere.  Jan and I added two more votes to this billing.  WOW!!!   This was GREAT.  They had collard greens, black-eyed peas, green beans, boiled corn on the cob, potato salad, cornbread….  You get the idea of our choices.  I suspect this would be like dying and going to “hog heaven”.  As we waddled out and got back into our RV we were only about 30 miles from Natchez.

Next we came to an old home that was built around 1780 for a plantation from a land grant.  As the Trace became more used, it became an inn.  A descendent from the original family still works for the park service there now.  He will be retiring this fall at 72 years of age.  He was one of the last to be born in the home.  What a beautiful setting on a hill (of sorts) overlooking the Natchez Trace and their surrounding lands.

A couple of miles further we came upon the second largest “Indian mound” in the states. From end to end it stretches over 700 feet. The base mound is about 35 feet tall with a flat top and a couple of smaller mounds on top of that. These mounds were being used when DeSoto first visited this area. But about a hundred years later they had been abandoned. The thought is that DeSoto’s explorers brought diseases to the Indians that they could not fight, making them weak and unable to defend themselves.

Finally, arrival into Natchez! The road down has been lightly traveled and thankfully uneventful. This is one of the hardest trips (so far) to photograph. Everything is so similar to home. Tomorrow we visit some of the Natchez homes (they aren’t found much in our area), so photos may be some better (I hope).