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“We’re going to be applying historical markers at each end of Old Agency Road,” Mayor Gene McGee said. “It’s an area we want to protect and preserve.”
Historical markers will be placed near Highland Colony Parkway and near Livingston Road after the Mississippi Department of Archives and History approved their use in January.
“It’s unique in that most cities don’t have a national park running through them,” McGee said. “It’s very beneficial to the city, and we think it’s a positive situation for us. It’s kind of been a secret for a while.”
Old Agency Road, or Old Natchez Trace, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1988 and designated as a Mississippi landmark. Seven years later, the Choctaw Agency site was also added to the National Register.
“It’s a neat place to go,” McGee said. “Andrew Jackson used the Trace and camped off Old Agency Road.”
And it’s near that spot Hugo Newcomb owns Jackson’s Camp, a Greek Revival-style home built in 2001 to resemble what a place would have looked like in the early 19th century when Jackson, the seventh president of the United States, traveled the trace with his troops following the Battle of New Orleans in 1815.
“His association with the Natchez Trace is a matter of historical record,” Newcomb, 64, said. “He traveled up and down the Trace from his early youth. This was all Choctaw territory. After the steamboats came in around 1830 or 1840, this road was used less and less and other roads were being developed. Sometime in the late 1800s, it faded into oblivion.”
JACKSON’S CAMP is a reminder.
Literature about the home says the Greek Revival style “swept the young nation after the American Revolution and was the physical expression of the cultural urge to extend their new democracy’ to the country by celebrating the architecture and style of ancient Greece. Jackson’s Camp is intended to exemplify and honor this early local heritage by demonstrating the conjunction of high-style Green Revival and vernacular Creole so often seen in the old houses of the Mississippi Territory.”
White Oak Creek lies just west of Jackson’s Camp, and it is near that water Newcomb believes Jackson and his troops rested after a confrontation with Indian Agent Silas Dinsmor, a U.S.-appointed ambassador to the Choctaw Nation.
“Mr. Dinsmor, as the Indian agent, was supposed to enforce the law which required all Europeans or settlers to have proper authorization to enter the Indian territories - something similar to what is now called a passport,” Newcomb said. “Andrew gets here and Dinsmor demanded papers. Well, Andrew didn’t like anybody demanding anything from him, so he camped out here on the creek.”
In 1820, when both men were at the Treaty of Doak’s Stand on the Trace, Dinsmor tried to reconcile with Jackson. The agent failed.
“He tried to talk to him and Jackson would have nothing to do with it, so he didn’t get his land and he faded into history,” Newcomb said. “If you made Andrew Jackson mad, that was it. He stayed mad at you.”
NEWCOMB SAID DINSMOR believed the Indians promised him 10,000 acres as part of the Choctaw Session. When he tried to make good on it during the treaty, Jackson blocked his efforts.
“Dinsmor was such a small figure it is not documented in much detail,” Newcomb said of the incident.
Old Natchez Trace runs west from Ridgeland and ends at Livingston Road, about a 3-mile stretch. Jackson’s Camp is bordered on the north by the Trace, on the south by the real Trace, Old Agency Road, on the east by Patterson’s Crossing Road and on the west by White Oak Creek.
Ridgeland’s Old Agency Road Corridor Preservation District preserves green space bordering the road and historic resources near it.
“We think preserving tree canopies and limiting development is important,” McGee said. “It really makes the city more livable.”
The 444-mile Trace commemorates an ancient trail that connected southern portions of the Mississippi River, through Alabama, to salt licks central Tennessee. Construction began in 1937 and was completed in 2005. It is governed by the National Park Service.
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