Adams County

The county in brief

A traveler's read on Adams County

Four hundred and forty-four miles of NPS-administered two-lane scenic parkway running from Natchez northeast to Nashville with no commercial truck traffic, no roadside billboards, no commercial development, and a 50 mph speed limit end-to-end — that is the Natchez Trace Parkway, the longest single NPS-managed scenic parkway in the United States per the FHWA Federal Lands Highway program, and one of only three NPS units that exist primarily as a linear scenic corridor rather than as a geographically bounded preserve (the other two are the Blue Ridge Parkway and the John D. Rockefeller Jr. Memorial Parkway in Wyoming). The Trace follows the path of a pre-Columbian Native American trade route that connected the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations' hunting grounds with the lower Mississippi River — the same overland route that 18th-and-19th-century 'Kaintucks' (Ohio Valley flatboat traders) walked back home north after selling their cargo and breaking up their flatboats for lumber at the Natchez and New Orleans markets.

Natchez itself is the oldest continuously occupied European settlement on the Mississippi River, founded as Fort Rosalie by French colonists in 1716 (predating New Orleans by 2 years and St. Louis by 48 years) and named for the Natchez Nation, the resident Mississippian-culture mound-building people whose 1729 uprising against French colonial occupation and subsequent 1731 French retaliatory destruction effectively ended Mississippian civilization in the lower Mississippi Valley. Adams County's 461 sq mi wrap the Natchez historic district (a National Historic Landmark District with more surviving pre-Civil-War Antebellum mansions per capita than any other US city — Stanton Hall, Longwood, Rosalie, Melrose, and Linden are the most-toured of the surviving 600+ structures), the Trace's southern terminus at MP 0, and the river bluffs above the Mississippi where the city sits on the loess-soil escarpment 200 ft above the floodplain. Natchez State Park 10 miles north on US-61 accepts rigs to 50 ft with full hookups across 50 sites — the only state-park RV-friendly base in Adams County. Rocky Springs and Jeff Busby campgrounds on the Parkway itself (both inside the county or just to the north) accept rigs to 35 ft on first-come no-hookup sites. The Parkway prohibits overnight roadside parking everywhere; commercial RV-friendly bases line US-61 north of town. Natchez NHP preserves Melrose Estate and the William Johnson House.