Driving through the hills on the curvy roads of southeastern Carroll County, one can’t help but be immersed in the remoteness of the area.
Dense woods cover the vast and varied terrain.
At the edge of the county, just outside the reach of cell phone signal, signs inform drivers of where they’re at: “Entering Natchez Trace State Forest.”
But in the early 1800s, settlers to the area didn’t have signs to tell them where to go. Rather, a large pecan tree and a hill let them know they found home.
At Wednesday’s meeting of the Huntingdon Historical Society, Brenda Brown walked attendees through the history of the area. She told stories about the land settled by her ancestors, and several others who were among Carroll County’s earliest residents nearly two centuries ago.
She explained that the Natchez Trace State Park and the Natchez Trace State Forest are not the same place.
The forest, the part of the reserve that sits in Carroll County, is what Brown came to talk about.
The land had been home to Native Americans, most recently the Chickasaw, for roughly 10,000 years before removal in the late 1700s opened it to settlers. Many of those settlers arrived from North Carolina shortly after the Revolutionary War, Brown explained.
“After the Revolutionary War, the soldiers didn’t get any pay,” she said. “They paid Revolutionary soldiers in land grants, and some of these land grants were in Carroll County.”
Westward to the Round Top
One group of those settlers, the ones Brown is descended from, made the roughly 880-mile trip from North Carolina by covered wagon. She said they traveled about 20 miles a day and navigated by landmarks.
Brown pointed to a 1964 book, “Westward to the Round Top” by Arving Edwin Morris, as an account of that journey. Morris, a Buena Vista native and great-grandson of Joseph Morris, who led the wagon train, wrote the book as historical fiction grounded in the family’s actual trip.
Two landmarks in particular drew them toward what would become Carroll County: a Pecan Tree, planted around 1815 from pecans a local woman reportedly received from soldiers returning from the War of 1812, and a hill called Round Top.
“Round Top,” Brown explained, “is located in what is now Benton County, but at the time that area was part of Carroll County.”
She went on to mention that the peak of Round Top is about 676 feet above sea level, which is nearly 210 feet higher than where the Carroll County Courthouse sits in Huntingdon.
The group of settlers arrived in the area sometime in the 1830s, but they arrived late in the year.
“They didn’t have time to build houses,” Brown explained. “But there are some caves at Round Top, and there was also some dugouts.”
Settlers spent that first winter living in those caves and dugouts cut into the hillsides.
By spring, the group split. Some stayed near Round Top, founding a community first called “Cavia”, which later took the name Shiloh.
Others moved west to settle along Maple Creek.
Both communities eventually built churches and, according to Brown, leaned on each other to do it.
The Maple Creek group chose a hilltop for their church, located near a spring in the hollow behind it. Brown said a member of the congregation, 101-year-old Ima Jean Hampton, still remembers fetching water from that spring during services.
The first pastor at what became Mount Comfort Church was Elijah Henry Autry, who Brown said has a more famous descendant.
“He was the great grandfather of Gene Autry,” she said. “There’s a lot of people [in the area] who are related to Gene Autry, so we’re kind of proud of that.”
Elijah Autry is buried in the area, though the rest of his family eventually moved to Texas, where he was originally from.
A County Divided
Brown described small, self-sufficient communities that grew up around Shiloh and Maple Creek in the decades before the Civil War, places with stores, a gristmill, a blacksmith shop, even a hotel and a saloon at Maple Creek.
Residents grew cotton as their only real cash crop but largely lived off the land otherwise, hunting and foraging for what the forest provided.
The Civil War divided Carroll County, Brown said, even though most families in the area she described didn’t own slaves and had little stake in the conflict.
“They just thought, well, we’ll just mind our own business, and we’ll just stay out of this,” Brown said. “But the war came to them, because during this time there was a lot of, I call it renegades or bushwhackers, deserters from the military. They were bad people, and they did bad things.”
After the war, with cotton markets gone and the soil eroding badly across the forest land, some families turned to moonshining to survive, Brown said. She explained that it was more of a desperate, communal trade rather than a criminal enterprise.
“The moonshiners were regular people. The guy that sat beside of you at church, he was the guy that helped you build your barn,” Brown said. “Nobody ever got rich making moonshine up there. They did it as a survival thing.”
The Land Becomes a Forest
The land’s fate changed in the 1930s, when the federal government, under the Works Progress Administration, began buying up roughly 16,000 acres in Carroll County to create the Natchez Trace State Park and State Forest.
Brown was skeptical of the official version of how willing residents were to sell.
“According to the official government record, the people were so happy to sell their land to the government,” Brown said. “Now if you believe that, I’ve got some lake front property to sell you.”
WPA crews built roads and bridges and dug out what became Maple Creek Lake, using the fill to address the gullies that decades of erosion had carved into the land.
Workers later planted kudzu across the property to control that erosion, a fix that famously outlived its usefulness.
“It’s been said that they took five years to plant it,” Brown said. “And they’ll spend 100 years trying to get rid of it.”
What Remains
Sixteen cemeteries, ranging from small family plots to the large burial ground at Mount Comfort, remain scattered through the forest, markers of communities that no longer stand. The Maple Creek community itself disappeared after the war when the railroad bypassed it three miles to the west, giving rise to the town of Westport instead.
Mount Comfort Church still holds services today, though Brown said attendance has thinned as the older generation has passed and no homes remain nearby. Shiloh Church, sitting just outside the state forest boundary, has fared better.
Brown took questions for several minutes after her talk, fielding follow-ups on a long-gone Maple Creek hotel, a short-lived Boy Scout camp, and the location of old home sites along Griggs Trail.
Several attendees said they had family ties to the area Brown described, including descendants of the Birdwell and Autry families.
Driving back out of the Natchez Trace State Forest area, the feeling is the same as driving in: this is land that time forgot.
But reminders of what came before are everywhere, if you know to look for them. Pecan Tree Road and Cavia Road pay homage to the experience of those early settlers.
Maple Creek Road, Mount Comfort Road, Griggs Trail, and several others are still gravel instead of pavement. Scattered along them, small markers carry some of the same names Brown spoke about: Blount. Parrish. Hampton.
The wagons are long gone, and so are most of the houses, schools and stores that grew up in their wake. The names, carved into stone, and stories from people like Brown, are what’s left.