News - Opinion

Sunday, Nov. 08, 2009

Parkway director puts more emphasis on tracing history

The ambiance of travel changes whenever a driver leaves a regular public highway or road and enters the Natchez Trace Parkway. The 444-mile-long part of the National Park Service and designated national scenic byway links history, nature and the varying cultures of three Deep South states — Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee.

The Trace’s new superintendent, Cameron Sholly, after two months of reviewing the responsibility handed him in August, said he will expand the interpretive role of the parkway’s staff, focusing more on the 1,000 identified resources along the route — historic venues, Native American cultural sites and natural features.

He also plans a heightened safety awareness for bicyclists, an appropriate and painful response during a year in which two cyclists were killed in accidents with motor vehicles on the Trace. In one of those deaths, a driver has been indicted on criminal charges, and a trial has been set in December.

Sholly’s heightened emphasis on interpretation poses a fine opportunity to draw more people into the Trace’s unique identity as a Native American and frontier-opening track. Its traffic connected various kinds of commerce from French Louisiana to the Upper Ohio valley in the period soon after American independence, reaching past the Louisiana Purchase in 1803.

While the Trace is a route for many tourists, it also is a daily commuting corridor for many residents along its full length. Many daily users never experience the historic, environmental and cultural attractions of the highway.

A key in expanding interpretive understanding of the Trace lies in drawing them back for more than a rushed commute. Many of the individual sites could sustain periodic special events drawing substantial numbers of visitors, particularly those with specific historic interests.

Sholly, for example, noted that the Meriwether Lewis site on the Trace about 100 miles south of Nashville has been rehabilitated and improved.

Lewis was the Lewis of Lewis and Clark Expedition fame, and he died, perhaps by suicide or maybe as a murder victim, at a tavern where he had stopped on his way to Washington in 1809, while he was governor of the Louisiana Territory. Lewis, former private secretary to Thomas Jefferson, was a key player in one of the most important decisions and episodes in American history.

Many other important links to how westward movement shaped the nation are on the Trace. We applaud Sholly’s emphasis.