Emerald Mound

Eight acres. A base 770 feet by 435 feet. Thirty-five feet high, topped by two smaller mounds that bring the summit to roughly sixty feet above the surrounding landscape. After Monks Mound at Cahokia, this is the second-largest ceremonial earthwork in the United States — and the Mississippian culture ancestors of the Natchez built it around a natural hill between 1200 and 1600 CE, depositing earth along the sides until they had reshaped the ground into an elongated, pentagonal-shaped, artificial plateau. The two secondary mounds on the summit are believed to be platforms for the homes of chiefs and other key leaders. The larger sits at the western end: 190 feet by 160 feet, thirty feet high. At its height, Emerald was the center of religious and civic rituals for a population who lived in outlying villages and hamlets. The Natchez used Emerald as their main ceremonial center at the time of first European contact. By the time of the La Salle Expedition of 1682, the tribe's main ceremonial center had moved to the Grand Village of the Natchez, twelve miles to the southwest. Six smaller mounds once flanked the edges of the primary mound, three on either side. A constructed ditch originally encircled the entire complex. Both were lost to erosion and plowing in the nineteenth century, when the site took its name from the Emerald Plantation that surrounded it. The National Park Service stabilized the mound in 1955 and declared it a National Historic Landmark in 1989. It is managed now by the Natchez Trace Parkway unit. Free and open dawn to dusk at milepost 10.3. You can walk to the top.