Featured Image: Explore Ridgeland
Most people know Ridgeland for its great shopping, a big lake, steakhouses galore, and charming neighborhoods that are filled with everything from wildflower fields to railroad tracks. But underneath the lakeside restaurants and before the Apple store moved to town, there’s a fascinating history that spans 12,000 years and includes at least one prehistoric whale.Â
For a history-rich getaway, hop aboard the Ridgeland History Trail that strings together 22 points of interest throughout town.Â
It Started With a Path
Many moons ago, long before anyone called it Ridgeland, the Jackson Prairie grasslands drew hunters to the area, where stone tools from Paleo-Indian populations dating back more than 12,000 years still remain. Those early trails through the wilderness eventually consolidated into The Natchez Trace, the 444-mile corridor connecting Natchez to Nashville that began as animal tracks and became one of the most traveled roads in North American history.
By 1811, federal agent Silas Dinsmoor had moved the Choctaw Agency to a site within modern-day Ridgeland, operating it as a de facto embassy to the sovereign Choctaw Nation until 1823. It’s the site of a famed battle between Dinsmoor and Andrew Jackson. It’s now listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and Old Agency Road (a 3.3-mile segment of the original Trace) is a Mississippi landmark.
Brashears Stand and the Kaintucks
In November 1806, a frontiersman named Robert Turner Brashears took out an advertisement in the Mississippi Messenger announcing he had opened a “House of Entertainment” in the wilderness at what is now Milepost 104.5 of The Natchez Trace Parkway. His primary customers were the Kaintucks, the Ohio River Valley farmers who notoriously floated corn, whiskey, and tobacco on flatboats south to Natchez and New Orleans. They sold the cargo and the timber from the boats, and then walked home. They trekked north on foot along The Trace, their pockets loaded down with silver.
Brashears offered corn for horses, coffee, bacon, whiskey, and hominy (corn soaked in rye). A lucky traveler got a crude bed; most slept on the floor or out on the porch. A blacksmith shop on the property handled broken axles and worn horseshoes, the only mechanic for miles in either direction. A preacher passing through in 1807 noted that Brashears “treated us very well but knew how to make a high bill.” The Stand also sat directly within the slave trade’s internal routes—enslaved people were marched along The Trace as the plantation economy expanded, and Brashears participated in that trade himself.
By the 1830s, steamboats had made the river journey far easier than the overland slog, and The Trace faded as a major route. Following the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek in 1830, the Choctaw were forced to cede their lands and relocate to Oklahoma.
Chicago Comes to Mississippi
The next major chapter came by rail. In 1896, two Chicago investors named Edward M. Treakle and Gorton W. Nichols purchased land in Madison County from the family of James B. Yellowley. They formed the Highland Colony Company and began marketing fertile Mississippi farmland to Midwestern families, using the Illinois Central rail line as their sales pitch. The village that grew up around the tracks was called… Ridgeland.
Early settlers planted strawberries, peaches, pears, and pecans, shipping their harvests as far as Chicago on the same freight trains that had brought their families south. By 1901, the Ridgeland Wagon Works was manufacturing carriages and farm equipment. The pecan trees planted by those first settlers are still standing throughout the city today. In 2024, on Ridgeland’s 125th anniversary, the pecan was officially designated the city tree.
While the Civil War had come and gone before Ridgeland’s official founding, the land holds stories. A building known as the King’s Inn served as headquarters for Confederate General Stephen Lee. And after the war, many Union veterans from the North settled in Ridgeland.
The Whale in the Dam
In 1960, construction began on the Ross Barnett Reservoir dam across the Pearl River. Today, it’s one of the primary draws for tourists coming to town. But when workers broke ground, they found the skeleton of a Basilosaurus — an ancient marine mammal that swam these waters some 40 million years ago.Â
Walking It Today
If you’re eager to explore Ridgeland’s history, the official Ridgeland History Trail is a doable roadmap for an afternoon. Grab your map from Ridgeland City Hall, then peruse the 22 markers that take you from prehistoric grasslands (Marker 20) to the sunken roadbed of Old Agency Road (Marker 10) to the site of the original Highland Colony office (Marker 3) to the Mississippi Craft Center off The Natchez Trace (Marker 15).
Find more Southern travel inspiration here.
| This article is presented in partnership with Explore Ridgeland, a Modern South Founding Partner.
