Rocky Springs

A vanished town you can walk, at milepost 54.8 on the Natchez Trace

Rocky Springs grew from a drink of water. In the late 1700s travellers on the old Natchez Trace stopped here at a natural spring beside a rock outcrop, and the settlement that grew around it took its name from the rocky springs. Mayburn Cooper settled in 1796, a post office opened in 1819, and by 1829 the Rocky Springs election precinct cast 90 votes. The town was first served by a circuit-riding preacher who came through only once or twice a month; in 1837 the Methodists built a church of their own, and the Rocky Springs Academy opened the following year.

Cotton made it prosperous. By 1860 some 2,616 free people lived across the 25 square miles around the springs, with three merchants, four physicians, four teachers, three clergy and 13 artisans in the town proper and 54 planters and 28 overseers on the farms, and more than 2,000 enslaved people worked the crop that made it all possible. Its history holds violence too: in May 1894 a Black man named Amos Hicks was shot dead in his home by a group of white men, suspected of burning buildings owned by a white man named Crawford.

Then, one blow after another, the town came apart. Union troops passed through during the Civil War, advancing from Port Gibson and Grand Gulf. Yellow fever struck in 1878. Boll weevils ate the cotton, and years of poor farming had already let the hills wash away. The last store closed in 1930, the spring itself, the reason the town existed, ran dry, and the post office followed in 1932.

Today Rocky Springs is a ghost town kept by the National Park Service at milepost 54.8 of the Natchez Trace Parkway, between the parkway and Old Port Gibson Road, open to walk in daylight. The 1837 Methodist church is the only building left, and its congregation held Sunday services until 2010, when it grew too small to go on. A short loop trail leads past a post office safe, a cistern and the sites of vanished buildings, with park placards telling the town's rise and fall, and a small cemetery beside the church holds some of the first settlers. A campground, a walkable stretch of the Old Trace and the Rocky Springs section of the Natchez Trace National Scenic Trail start nearby, with a path about three miles south to the Owens Creek waterfall.