Day 7 – Dawgs and Rebs Day

Natchez Trace trail

Today’s agenda was a trip though history and then visits to the top two universities in Mississippi – Mississippi State and Ole Miss. We started the history portion of the agenda at the Natchez Trace Visitor Center in Tupelo and drove south on 60 miles of the 444-mile Natchez Trace Parkway which runs from Natchez to Nashville. The parkway served as an ancient trail for the American Indian and later it was used by the “Kaintucks” who walked home after taking flatboats with goods down the Mississippi River to New Orleans and Natchez. Once the steamboat came into usage on the river in the early 1800s, the need to walk home was eliminated and the trail is now preserved by the National Park Service. For us, it was a very nice drive just seeing nature with no signs, stores, guardrails or signs of life other than an occasional car. It was a very enjoyable drive and we stopped to see Indian mounds and to walk a portion of the historic Natchez Trace trail, as had been done for thousands of years. Very cool.

Needs More Cowbell!!!

Once off the parkway, we went to Starkville to tour the Mississippi State campus. As you can see, I’m wearing my Dawgs shirt in front of the football stadium. The campus is very beautiful and the weather couldn’t have been any better. Had a great BBQ brisket sandwich lunch at Little Dooey (recommended by Megan) and headed back north to Oxford.

First stop in Oxford was Rowan Oak, the home of William Faulkner and where he wrote many of his great novels. The house is exactly how you would picture a great house in the south in the 1930s. There was no driveway up to the house, which dates back to antebellum time and stands in the middle of a strand of old cedar trees.

Rowan Oak

The Rowan Oak property backs up to the Ole Miss campus which has a history of its own, some good and some bad. The admission of James Meredith in 1962 to the formerly segregated university was one of the flashpoints of the civil rights movement, but today we were reminded more of their sports history as we drove on Manning Drive to see the stadium and “the grove” where the campus celebrates before big games. The town of Oxford is a cute small town with its courthouse square surrounded by restaurants and we especially liked Square Books, the old kind of bookstore that you can't find anymore.