Natchez Trace & Franklin: Tennessee's Antebellum South

The Natchez Trace Parkway, which begins at Nashville and runs 444 miles southwest to Natchez, Mississippi, is the most historically layered scenic road in the American South — the trace follows the path used by Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Creek peoples for millennia, then by Kaintuck flatboatmen returning north from New Orleans after floating their goods downriver, then by Andrew Jackson's army returning from New Orleans in 1815. The 30-mile section south of Nashville passes Civil War sites, Mound Bottom (a pre-Columbian Mississippian mound complex), and the beautiful parkway design of the NPS. Franklin, 20 miles south of Nashville, is an antebellum market town with the best-preserved 19th-century commercial district in Middle Tennessee and the site of the bloodiest few hours of the Civil War at the Battle of Franklin.