Our Route

Baton Rouge, LA - Nashville, TN 

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The following are the planned overnight stays with the departure each morning planned for 6:00 am:

1. Sunday night, Sept. 30:   Shelby's RV Park, 14189 Louisiana 10 Hwy, St. Francisville, LA 70775  

2.  Monday night, Oct. 1:   Rocky Springs Site (Natchez Trace milepost 54.8).  

3.  Tuesday night, Oct 2:   Jeff Busby Site  (Natchez Trace milepost 193.1).

4.  Wednesday night, Oct 3:  Tishomingo State Park  (Natchez Trace milepost 304.5).

5.  Thursday night, Oct 4:  Meriwether Lewis Site   (Natchez Trace milepost 385.9)

From Meriwether Lewis there will be a more leisurely departure Friday morning with the plan to arrive at the TN Hwy 100 terminus about 2:00 pm on Friday, Oct. 5. 

We will travel back to Garrison Creek (on the Trace) for the victory lunch.

Additional riders are particularly invited for this last day's ride of about 57 miles.

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About the The Natchez Trace National Parkway

(444 miles from near Nashville, TN to Natchez, MS on the Mississippi River north of New Orleans, LA)

“Pedaling 4 Prevention” plans largely to travel the Natchez Trace Parkway.  Bountiful Blessings Farm, the local headquarters for the biking adventure is located one mile off the Trace between the Highway 7 and Highway 50 exits, near its northern terminus.  The Parkway itself is a paved two lane road which allows no commercial travel, billboards or other distractions from the natural beauty as it travels through the states of Tennessee, a corner of Alabama, and a large part of Mississippi.  Administered by the National Park Service of the U. S. Department of Interior, it is considered an ideal biking route.

Following closely the original trail carved by the hooves and paws of wild animals and later the moccasin clad feet of the Chickasaw, Choctaw and Natchez Indians, the National Parkway contains over 180 sections of the original Trace. It earned the nickname, “the devil’s backbone,” because the original trail followed the winding ridges of the hills in Tennessee.  It came into history in 1540 as the Spanish explorer, Don Hernando de Soto, used a portion of it as he crossed it in his fateful journey to discover the Mississippi River and his death on its banks. In 1733, the French were familiar enough with it to map it as an Indian trail running from Natchez to the northeast.

By the late 1700s, it had become a familiar footpath for such as Andrew Jackson, the 7^th president to be; the famous naturalist, John James Audubon; and Meriwether Lewis, the leader of the Lewis and Clark Expedition and who later became the first governor of the new “Louisiana Territory” and who died under mysterious circumstance on the Trace as he traveled north on it towards Washington, DC.   Recognizing the importance of communication with what was then called the “Southwest,” President Thomas Jefferson commissioned the Trace as one of the first national postal roads.  The beginning of the work on the Trace was in 1801 when the US Army was authorized to improve the trail and maintain it.  

The Natchez Trace saw its heyday during a 40 year period from 1785 when boatmen in large numbers began rafting down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to Natchez and New Orleans carrying goods such as furs, tobacco, iron, rope, flour and whiskey from Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Kentucky to the world markets available through New Orleans.  The flatboats were one-way vessels and were broken up and sold for lumber which helped build New Orleans and plantation houses along the lower Mississippi.  There was no other way to return home except to hoof it over the Trace back to Nashville where connections were available to the  rapidly developing rest of the then United States.  By 1810, as many as 10,000 from Kentucky alone were tramping up that ancient, difficult and dangerous wilderness road, the most heavily traveled in the old Southwest.  

The invention and development of steam engines and steamboats in the early 1800s made it much more comfortable for boatmen to return home.  The transition from the Natchez Trace to steamboats is illustrated in the story of the Lincoln family.  Thomas Lincoln in 1806 steered a flatboat down the river to New Orleans where he sold the boat and its produce and then made the at least 21 day hike back up the Natchez Trace to Nashville and then on to Kentucky where he soon after married his sweetheart, Nancy Hanks.  Just 22 years later, Tom and Nancy’s tall son, Abraham, as a 19 year old made a similar 1,000 mile flatboat trip down to New Orleans, but in 1828 Abraham Lincoln’s employer paid his way back on one of the many whistle blowing steam boats that now plied the rivers.  The Trace was fast becoming history.

The fascinating history of the Natchez Trace includes its relations to the intriguing Native American culture, the opening up of the “West” with its trade down the river and Jefferson’s Louisiana Territory purchase from Napoleon, and the Trace’s relations to the War of 1812 with the British. All of this and more started to come back alive in the mid-1930s when President Franklin D. Roosevelt recommended the Natchez Trace Parkway as one of the depression recovery “public works projects.”  The first contracts for work on the Parkway were made in June, 1937; the last section of the Parkway was completed in May, 2005.