On our Spring vacation trip in late April and early May, we launched from Swifton, Ark., early on Monday, April 25. That night, after driving across Mississippi and much of Alabama, we found a motel room in Childersburg, Ala., southeast of Birmingham.
As it happened, that was the night that the bad tornado hit nearby Tuscaloosa and parts of Birmingham.
We were fortunate not to be in the path of the storm.
Our first “destination city” for the day was Oxford, Miss., the home of Ole Miss. We had decided to avoid the main-traveled highways for most of the trip, so we took a route east from Senatobia on Mississippi Highway 4, and then south to Oxford.
As we traveled State Hwy. 4, I kept looking for an indication of how people along the road made a living. We weren’t seeing the huge grain fields that are common in east Arkansas, and I can’t be certain of the kind of farming taking place in that part of north Mississippi. One thing that stood out along the way was a vast infestation of kudzu vines, covering the fences, climbing the tree tops, mile after mile, covering any space that wasn’t mowed or cared for. But the fact there were fences along the way made me think that there must be livestock back in the fields beyond our sight, behind the kudzu. Kudzu was once touted as a cure for eroding hillsides, but it doesn’t know when to quit growing, and it presents it’s own problem.
We spent an hour or soon the downtown square in Oxford, watching the local tour buses come and go, seeing the people, and browsing shops around the square. To me, the Oxford Square is like being in a wealthy town 100 years ago. One of the attractions to us, since we are book lovers, was The Square Books Store. They must have had every book ever written about the Civil War. One even gets the idea that the folks down south may still not be convinced that the Civil War settled things aright. We had lunch in a busy taco place, down the street off the city square.
The food was good. It was one of those new places in an old building where you choose the goodies to go on your taco.
After lunch, we headed for Tupelo, Miss., intent on exploring the visitors center on the Natchez Trace Parkway, and driving a stretch of the parkway.
We actually neglected the Tupelo National Battlefield in order to spend time exploring Mississippi’s Indian heritage. The old Natchez Trace was a 500-mile footpath through lands occupied by the Choctaw and Chickasaw tribes, reaching diagonally northeastward across the state from Natchez, crossing the northwest corner of Alabama, and stretching on to Nashville, Tenn. These days, the Trace is drivable, via the Parkway, and has many state parks, national military parks, and scenic views along the way. Back when travel in the area was by foot, by horseback or by pack animal, it would have been the main route from southwest Mississippi to central Tennessee. We spent an hour or so exploring the videos and displays at the visitor’s center.
Back in the 1990s, in east Arkansas, I was pastor of a small church in Tupelo,Ark. Sometimes when I was elsewhere in Arkansas, and would mention my church in Tupelo, someone would remark that they thought Tupelo was in Mississippi or Alabama. So I learned to describe their Tupelo as the big Tupelo, in northeast Mississippi, and to compare it to my little Tupelo, which was a tiny Jackson County town on Arkansas Highway 17 south of Newport, Ark. My Tupelo was once a bustling, thriving little railroad town in a grain-producing region, but as the years passed after World War II, the railroad closed down, and like many other little towns in east Arkansas, my Tupelo has gradually faded. Not so, Tupelo, Miss., which today isa large and evidently prosperous place.
Tupelo, Miss., is one of many interesting stops along the Natchez Trace Parkway. The old Natchez Trace makes me think of our own old, old road in northwest Arkansas. Today we commonly call it the Old Wire Road. The telegraph line which gave the road it’s name, Old Wire, was built along the roadway about 1860, but the road itself goes back to at least the early 1800s as a road, and like the Natchez Trace, was probably a footpath used by the Osage Indians and others for ages before that.
Sometimes I like to stop and think about the generations, red and brown and white, who passed this way before us, and who shaped these territories and passed them on to us.
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Editor’s note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history.
He is vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected], or call 621-1621.
Community, Pages 5 on 06/01/2011