One day when we went to Clarksville we got lost and found a way home that passed a place that had something to do with the Civil War so we decided to go back and see if we could find it all over again. We remembered it had been on Old Clarksville-Springfield Road, so that was where we headed. Eventually we found the place we had seen it was called Port Royal State Historic Site.
Port Royal was one of the earliest settlements and became a settler's fort around 1785 and a town in 1797, just one year after Tennessee became a state. Port Royal was an important commerce center because Sulphur Fork joins the Red River at this location as well as this being on a major stage coach route, The Great Western Road, that crossed the Red River here. The Great Western Road was the major road was the major road west from Nashville. Port Royal was a center of commerce for northern middle Tennessee and South Central Kentucky.
What made this trip interesting was we met a gentleman dressed in a Tennessee Park Service uniform who was doing some trimming along a park path down to a big bridge. He gave us an informal history lesson that was very interesting. He said that this area had been a very important place for tobacco farmers because they brought their product here to ship it to New Orleans. Buyers bought flat boats that were built right here and shipped the tobacco to New Orleans and then just left the boats there. The next time they were here, they just bought another boat. He also showed us the foundation a store that was over 200 years old and had served the area. The next thing he did was give us a botany lesson when he showed us the leaves of a black walnut tree and then showed us another tree that appeared to have similar leaves. The other tree was called the Tree of Heaven and was highly poisonous. It can kill animals quickly, when they choose to eat a nut and cause anaphylactic shock in humans.
Port Royal was a transportation corridor for the Cherokee Indians on the Trail of Tears and for Union and Confederate Solderers during the civil war. Since this was an extremely agriculturally rich area, both Union and Confederate soldiers plundered the area for supplies. Wessyngton Plantation, which was nearby, was owned by George A. Washington. Before the war this plantation was the nation's largest dark fired tobacco plantation and had the largest slave population in Tennessee. Following the war those same slaves established schools and churches, opened businesses and even purchased parcels of land from where they had been enslaved.
We got back in the car and traveled across the bridge to the other part of the park to look at the Trail of Tears. Had we been dressed more appropriately and it had not been 90 humid degrees we would have walked part of it, but we have decided to leave that for another day.
