Road Trips

Along the Natchez Trace, women’s stories are literally written into the landscape—if you know where to look. The new Guide to the Natchez Trace makes those stories easier to find by flagging a series of “Women of the Trace” stops: places where women taught, ran businesses, shaped communities, and quietly altered the course of regional history. For Women’s History Month, here are four of those stops that reveal how deeply women are woven into the Trace’s 9,000‑year “ribbon of time.”

1. Elizabeth Female Academy (Milepost 5.1): A Radical Classroom in the Woods

It’s easy to miss: just a short paved path off the Parkway near Natchez, leading to a single brick wall rising from the trees. That wall is all that remains of Elizabeth Female Academy, but the ideas that once lived here were anything but ruinous.

Founded in 1818 and operating until 1845, Elizabeth Female Academy was the first degree‑granting institution for women in Mississippi, and some historians now argue it may have been the very first women’s college in the United States. The school granted a Domina Scientiarum—“Mistress of Sciences”—at a time when the idea of women pursuing higher education was still controversial, even laughable, in many circles.

The academy sat on land donated by Elizabeth Roach Greenfield, a reminder that women shaped this institution not just from the lectern and the student benches, but from the deed books and financial underpinnings as well. Its curriculum was advanced for the era, designed to offer more than “finishing school” polish to the daughters of the emerging planter elite. Varina Howell, who would later marry Jefferson Davis, was among its graduates; noted naturalist John James Audubon briefly taught here, too.

Today, the ruin is quiet, but standing in front of that lone wall, you’re looking at one of the earliest physical manifestations of a radical idea in the Deep South: that women’s minds were worth educating, not just their manners.

2. Mount Locust Historic Inn and Plantation (Milepost 15.5): Polly Chamberlain’s Front Desk

A few miles farther up the Trace, Mount Locust looks, at first glance, like a classic old Southern house: a simple frame structure, shaded by trees, with outbuildings and fields beyond. But in the early 1800s, this was one of the most important“stands” on the Natchez Trace—an inn, farm, and waystation rolled into one—and a woman was at the center of it.

Mount Locust is the only surviving pre‑1820 stand left along the Trace. While the property passed through several hands, the guide highlights Paulina “Polly” Chamberlain as one of the women who ran it. In an era when the route was infamous for bandits, disease, and grueling conditions, stands like Mount Locust were lifelines for Kaintuck boatmen trudging home from Natchez, postal riders racing deadlines, and itinerant traders moving between river and upland towns.

Running a stand was hard, entrepreneurial work. A standkeeper’s day might include cooking for a roomful of men, managing enslaved laborers or hired help, tending kitchen gardens and livestock, handling payments, and keeping peace among exhausted, often armed travelers crowded into a single room. Women like Polly Chamberlain weren’t just “helping” husbands; they were co‑managers and, in many cases, the steady, long‑term presence that kept these frontier businesses going as men came and went.

Visiting Mount Locust today, you can tour the restored inn, walk the grounds, and read interpretive panels that bring those stories forward. It’s a rare chance to recognize a woman who did what so many women have done in travel history: run the place, quietly and competently, while others got the headlines.

3. Windsor Ruins (near Milepost 30.0): The Daniell Sisters’ Ghostly Columns

If you’ve seen photographs of the Natchez Trace, chances are you’ve seen Windsor Ruins: a surreal cluster of towering brick columns rising from a Mississippi hillside, all that remains of a once‑lavish Greek Revival mansion.

The guide tags Windsor Ruins as a “Women of the Trace” stop because of Priscilla and Catherine Daniell (often spelled Daniell or Daniel in historical records). The plantation house they inhabited symbolized the extremes of wealth and exploitation that defined much of the antebellum South. Their lives, and the lives of the enslaved people whose labor sustained Windsor, played out along the broader Trace corridor of trade, warfare, and cultural exchange.

Windsor was completed in the early 1860s and survived the Civil War, only to be destroyed by an accidental fire in 1890. What’s left now—the 23 columns, bits of ironwork, and the footprint of the house—invites visitors to confront women’s roles in that world. Plantation mistresses like the Daniell sisters wielded real economic and social power within a violently unequal system. They managed households the size of small villages, oversaw domestic labor, and stood at the center of a social network that extended from Natchez drawing rooms to rural churches and crossroads.

At Windsor Ruins, you’re not only looking at an architectural marvel; you’re looking at the stage on which women navigated the contradictions of privilege, duty, and complicity in slavery. In Women’s History Month, it’s an important reminder that women’s stories along the Trace are not uniformly heroic—but they are central to understanding the place.

4. Gordon House and Ferry Site (Milepost 407.7): Dolly Cross Gordon’s River Crossing

Near the northern end of the Parkway in Tennessee, the brick Gordon House stands watch over a quiet stretch of the Duck River. In the early 1800s, this was a bustling transportation hub, and a woman—Dolly Cross Gordon—was one of the figures who kept people and goods moving.

The Gordons operated a ferry here, shuttling travelers, mail, and livestock across a river that could otherwise be a serious barrier. Ferries were crucial choke points in the old transportation network, and running one combined navigation skill, business sense, and a high tolerance for risk. Floods, storms, and seasonal surges could turn a routine crossing deadly.

As with many frontier enterprises, the work was often a family affair. The guide includes the Gordon House under “Women of the Trace” because Dolly Cross Gordon helped run this operation and maintain the household that anchored it. Widowhood, illness, or simple necessity frequently pushed women into legal and financial leadership too; documents from similar sites show women leasing ferries, signing contracts, and defending property claims when husbands died or departed.

Today, visitors can walk around the exterior of the Gordon House, look down toward the former ferry crossing, and imagine what it meant for Dolly and her contemporaries to live at a literal and figurative crossroads—where the old footpath Trace met the river route, and where women’s “unseen” work made travel possible.

These four sites are only a sampling of the “Women of the Trace” the guide brings to the surface, from legendary figures at Witch Dance to the Yuchi woman commemorated at the Wichahpi Stone Wall, to modern champions like Roane Fleming Byrnes, the “Mother of the Natchez Trace,” who led the 20th‑century campaign to create the Parkway itself.

In a month dedicated to women’s history, the Natchez Trace offers something rare: an entire national park where women’s stories aren’t a side note, but a thread you can follow—from ruined academies and ghostly columns to busy ferry crossings and humble roadside inns—milepost by milepost.