Deans Stand on the Natchez Trace Parkway

Deans Stand is not right alongside the Natchez Trace Parkway as many other stops are, but is instead located about a tenth of a mile down a side road. It is in this area that William Dean built a stand (aka inn) back in 1823, though nothing remains of it today. Unlike modern hotels, most stands were not separate buildings, but just rooms for rent in the proprietor’s house or a place to sleep in the yard—the first “bed and breakfast” establishments, so to speak. A few years prior, this was Choctaw Indian land, but the Choctaw gave it up in 1820 when they signed the Treaty of Doaks Stand.

If you look closely towards the forest, you will notice a bridge that spans a small creek. It looks like it’s about to collapse—in fact the area is closed due to this—but even if it does, you don’t have far to fall. If you like old cemeteries, take the risk, because there is one back in the woods. I don’t know if it has a name, for most are named after a particular family and there are a number of families buried here, though oddly enough, no Deans. The graves range in date from the mid-1800s to the early 1900s. Most interesting are the graves that only give a first name, as if, in this rural area, the people living here never imagined that the world would ever get bigger. Their families would always be here, and nobody would ever move away. They never dreamed that one day their cemetery would just be an abandoned curiosity in the middle of the woods along something as expansive as the Natchez Trace Parkway. In a thousand years, the same handful of families would still be living here, and everyone would remember Eula.