NATCHEZ – The last two sections of a Natchez-to-Nashville route established as a federal parkway 71 years ago are to be officially opened in a Saturday ceremony.

The sections are 13.5 miles between Interstates 55 and 20, from near Ridgeland to western Clinton, and an 8-mile extension from the parkway’s current southern terminus to its new ending point here, said management analyst Jerry Pendleton of the the parkway’s Tupelo headquarters.

Paths that follow the current Trace are believed to have been worn beginning thousands of years ago by large animals traveling southwest-to-northeast along a slight, natural ridgeline to salt licks along the Cumberland River in central Tennessee, parkway interpretive specialist Ernie Price said. The animals probably included deer, buffalo and extinct species such as the giant sloth, Price added.

“It was the path of least resistance,” Price said, adding that the old Trace’s route required relatively few water-crossings. “The creeks ran away from it.”

Many names for the route were recorded after the Spaniard Hernando De Soto became among the first Europeans to explore the area in 1540, Price said.

“It did evolve into a singular path but it didn’t start out that way,” Price said of the beginning of the Trace’s development as a highway, adding that obstacles such as fallen trees caused travelers to detour from and then return to what became the main trail.

The route began to become a single path in the late 1700s, after the establishment of Natchez and Nashville as important trading and transportation centers, Price said.

The route’s names as they appeared on early maps included names of the Choctaw and Chickasaw Indian tribes that lived in the area. Such Indians knew the Trace’s route even though they traveled mainly locally, between villages that were not on the route, Price added.

Indians “helped travelers stay on the Trace,” Price said. “They wanted to keep outsiders on the Trace” and away from their villages.

Foot and horse traffic on the Trace reached its peak beginning in about the 1780s.

“By 1785 Ohio River Valley farmers searching for markets had begun floating their crops and products down the rivers to Natchez or New Orleans,” the brochure for the parkway says. “Because they sold their flatboats for lumber, returning home meant either riding or walking. The trail from Natchez was the most direct.”

Steam-powered boats began being used for upriver traffic about 1812, marking the beginning of the end of the route’s importance as a thoroughfare during the nation’s westward expansion.

An NPS-sanctioned guidebook of the Trace by Fairview, Tenn., author F. Lynne Bachleda was published earlier this year by Menasha Ridge Press.

“The trace lay dormant for a good hundred years,” Bachleda said of the century after steamers began carrying passenger traffic up the Mississippi and its tributaries.

The marking of the trace’s route was begun by the Mississippi Daughters of the American Revolution in about 1908.

“They were the ones who started putting up markers and started the campaign to revive the legacy of the Trace,” Bachleda said.

The DAR’s efforts led to a federal survey of the route and Congress’ creation of the parkway on May 18, 1938. Funding for the completion of the continuous route that is to be opened Saturday has come intermittently since then, Bachleda said.

“It may be the longest-running federally funded project of its type,” Bachleda said.

Saturday’s events include an opening of a visitor center at Clinton from 9:30 a.m. until 10:30 a.m., removal of barricades signaling the opening of the Jackson-to-Clinton section between 11 a.m. and 11:30 a.m., a caravan from there to Clinton that is to include cars built during the entire period of the parkway’s development, a parkway completion ceremony at its new southern terminus from 2 p.m. until 4 p.m. and a public reception at the Melrose tour home here from 4:30 p.m. until 5:30 p.m.

Members of Mississippi’s congressional delegation including the state’s two U.S. senators, at least one of the state’s congressmen and officials of the state department of transportation are among those expected to speak here Saturday, Pendleton said.

A public presentation at the local DAR chapter’s monthly meeting is set for 6 p.m. Monday in the parish hall of Church of the Holy Trinity, Episcopal, 900 South St., said Harriette Elrod of the chapter.

More than 50 inns called “stands” were established along the Trace before 1820. One, Mount Locust in Jefferson County, still exists and is open to tourists. A man who was born in the home, as were members of four generations of his family before him, Eric “Rick” Chamberlain, is a parkway ranger who lives at the site and gives tours of the home.

He is the scheduled guest speaker for the Monday program and said he plans to show “Ribbon of Green,” a 25-minute video on the Trace’s history, followed by a talk on Mount Locust and his family’s connection to it.

Today, the parkway stretches 444 miles through Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee. The speed limit on it is 50 mph unless posted otherwise and all business vehicles are prohibited unless they are for recreational use and are no longer than 55 feet, Pendleton said.

The parkway is the second-longest of six in the National Park Service, shorter by 25 miles than the country’s other major such road, the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina and Virginia. It tallied about 5.3 million recreation visits in 2004 and is the seventh-most used unit of the National Park Service, Pendleton said. Counting commuter traffic, the road is used about 12 million times a year, she said.

The parkway ran on a budget of $9.8 million during its 2004 fiscal year.

One of the sites that offers the most activities is that of the abandoned town of Rocky Springs, southeast of Vicksburg and about 15 miles from both Port Gibson and Utica. A short trail from the upper parking area leads to the old town site, and camping, picnicking and horseback riding are among the activities available.

“It’s unbelievable there are still places like that where you don’t have truck traffic,” said Herston Ingle of Little Rock, Ark., who visited Emerald Mound, built by Natchez Indians about 1400, last week with his wife, Robbie, and Yorkshire terrier, Beau. “It takes you back in time.”

A northeast Mississippi couple celebrating their 19th wedding anniversary in Natchez and along the trace, Leslie and Christy Riley of Okolona, toured Springfield Plantation in Jefferson County last week. The site bills itself as the site of the first mansion in the state and is where former president Andrew Jackson married Rachel Robards in 1791.

“We live right off the Trace near Houston (Miss.),” Leslie Riley said, adding that the couple’s children like to travel the Trace between their home and Tupelo. “A lot of times we go on Saturdays and picnic at the Indian mounds,” Christy Riley added.

The parkway encompasses nearly 52,000 acres, about 29 times the area of Vicksburg National Military Park.

A Civil War historic site called Bailey Farm was acquired by the federal government in January 2003 and is to be managed by the parkway after studies are complete. The farm encompasses 470 acres bordering about 8,000 feet of the parkway and Port Gibson-Raymond Road.

A home on the old Dillon plantation on the property served as headquarters of Gen. U.S. Grant and and is where historians have said Grant made a key decision in the campaign for Vicksburg, changing his plan and moving toward Jackson before turning west toward Vicksburg, which fell in 1863.