Natchez Trace Parkway Terminus

Stand at the corner of Liberty Road where the milepost zero marker meets interpretive panels, and you're standing at the end of something older than the republic. The Natchez Trace Parkway runs 444 miles north to Nashville with no stoplights and no commercial traffic — a National Park Service road since 1938 following what began as a buffalo trace between the salt deposits of the Cumberland Plateau and the grazing pastures of central Mississippi. The Choctaw and Chickasaw improved it for foot-borne commerce between villages. By the time European settlement reached the lower Mississippi, it was the fastest means of communication between the Cumberland Plateau and the Gulf settlements. Natchez became the southern anchor because of what happened here after the flatboats arrived. Men built boats upstream, loaded them with cargo and with enslaved people, and drifted the current south to Natchez or New Orleans. They sold everything, including the salvageable logs, then walked home via the Trace. Natchez was where river commerce stopped and the overland return began — the hinge between float and footpath. The city's bluff location made it a center of trade for two centuries, and the most prevalent slave trading city in Mississippi in the decades before the Civil War. The Trace was how the profits walked back north. President Roosevelt signed the parkway into law on May 18, 1938. Construction began in 1939. The final two segments opened on May 21, 2005. The road is free, open 24 hours, and designated an All-American Road. Long-distance cyclists favor it. The speed limit is 50 miles per hour except where posted lower. You're here because this is where it starts — where the path that bison beat became the route that built a city, then became the road that remembers both.