Mississippi
Chickasaw Village
Site of a Winter House
An interpretive sign and concrete
curb mark the site of a
Chickasaw winter house.
Tupelo 1736
Another interpretive sign shows
visitors how the Chickasaw town
and fort may have appeared at
the time of the campaign of 1736.
The National Park Service has used a
concrete curb to outline the site of the
Chickasaw Fort.
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The Chickasaw Village Site is located on the
Natchez Trace Parkway at Tupelo,
Mississippi. The site includes a parking area,
interpretive shelter, paved trail past the
marked sites of the Chickasaw fort and winter
house. A separate trail and boardwalks guide
visitors through an adjacent natural area.
A word of warning, many local residents use
this section of the Trace for their daily travel
and traffic can be quite heavy at peak times.
The Tupelo has been a center of
population in Northeast Mississippi
for hundreds of years. Once the
center of the powerful Chickasaw
nation, the region abounds in sites
significant in Native American history.
One of these, now called the
Chickasaw Village, lies on the west
side of the modern city along the
route of the Natchez Trace parkway.
The site includes the protected
remains of a Chickasaw town,
complete with a rectangular fort
probably erected by the warriors of the
town for defense against the French
colonists, with whom they were at war.
The French tried to defeat the
Chickasaw in 1736 with a
two-pronged campaign. The warriors
proved better strategists than the
French soldiers, however, and
defeated each prong of the campaign
in detail, driving away the French in
two bloody battles fought somewhere
near this site.
