Emerald Mound

What the heck is that you ask?

Well I'll tell ya. It's one of my all time favorite places to go visit. Emerald Mound is a hill that was sculpted into it's present shape by the Natchez Indians, on what is now part of the Natchez Trace Parkway just north of Natchez, Mississippi.

The mound itself is like a rectangular plateau, about 35 feet tall. It's like an oversized soccer field that has risen up out of the ground. This flat part of the mound has two smaller mounds on it. A large one at one end of the rectangle, and a smaller one at the other end.

It's a pretty impressive thing to see. This area was inhabited by the Natchez Indians, and this mound built around 1200AD.

This section of the Natchez Trace Parkway is a beautiful drive. There are picnic areas and when we were kids and lived in nearby Vidalia, Louisiana, we would sometimes go over there to swim in Coles Creek and see Emerald Mound.

Here are some photos that don't show the whole thing, you'll have to go to the links above for an aerial view of the mound. This photo on their website, you have to look at it a minute to realize what your lookin' at. Like I said, it's a plateau with two smaller mounds on it.

(As always, give the photos a click so you can see more detail.)

This first photo is of me near the top of the larger mound on top of the plateau part. This was taken in around 1966 or 1967, when I was four or five. Here, I'm almost at one end of the mound, and you can see the smaller mound in the distance. This thing is HUGE.

This next photo was actually taken in 1961, before I was born. I added this one so you could see the larger mound that I'm on in the top photo. That's it in the background there. That's my 'Mamaw Hinton', my maternal grandmother on the right in the red sweater and white scarf looking for pecans, and my 'Papaw Hinton' to the left of the pecan tree. You can see my older brother Paul beside him, but he was just a little feller there, about two years old.

In 1992, we were in the process of moving back to Louisiana from the Atlanta, Georgia area for me to attend Louisiana Tech University. That June we took our girls to the Natchez Trace for a picnic and to see Emerald Mound. Lovely Wife had them pose in the same place I had stood all those years ago, so you can compare this photo with the top one.

And last, but not least, here's yours truly thrown in there for good measure, so all three of us can stand there and squint into the sun. (Oh, to be twenty nine again. Whew!)

So that's a little bit o' learnin' for y'all's noggins. Look up the links if you care to learn a little more.

Though, now that I look at these photos, it makes me think I'll have to see if I have some that take in more of the mound. Hmmm. Probably trying to conserve film, something I always regret later.