THE Trip, THE Encore' :: Driving Natchez Trace, Day Four, Part Two

Copyright 2012, CABS for Reflections From the Fence

Day four on the Natchez Trace was busy and full of photos, 285 photos!  We are almost to the end of our drive of 434 of the 444 miles of the Trace, the weather was quite pleasant.  It was a great day!

One of our stops was at Mount Locust.  Mount Locust was built in 1780, and is one of the oldest structures in Mississippi.  It was a working plantation and a Inn.  It is the only surviving Inn from the time when the Old Natchez Trace was in it's prime, there had been more than 50 Inns or stations at one time.  It has been restored to show what the home looked like in 1810.

Look at the size of those tree stumps holding the porch up.  I so wanted to sit in that rocker and rest a spell.

The rooms are charming, all these years later:

Children's toys, love, love, LOVE, that hobby horse:

The storeroom:

There were two cemeteries on the property, they will appear in a future blog post.

We made a few other stops before jumping off the Trace and back into the real world, the most memorable was Emerald Indian Mound.  It is actually off the Trace a bit, and the road in was, well, not really meant for Jolly and Tana.  We did not see any warnings before we had started down the twisting, narrow, bumpy road.  Once committed, there was NO turning around, Man was a bit white knuckled, I sat quietly, praying! LOL  But, in the end, there was a nice enough turn around and enough parking for all 53 feet of the train (err, Jolly and Tana), especially since we were the only visitors at that time.  The quiet was all encompassing.  This mound is the second largest "temple mound" in the United States.  It is an 8 acre mound, used between about 1300 and 1600 by the Mississippians, who were ancestors of the Natchez Indians.  It was designated a  National Historic Landmark in 1989 by the Department of the Interior.  The photo does not show the size well, on the far right you can barely see a stairwell handrail.  This mound is 30 foot tall.

We spent the night over in Vidalia Louisiana.  We got to cross the Mississippi River twice in two days, so, I shall end this post with two photos of that bridge, one as dusk with the golden light and one at night.

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