Natchez Trace Pecan, Wildersville, TN

The remnants of the Natchez Trace Pecan blown by the wind.

What is known for certain about this old pecan tree is that in 1973 it was given the designation of the World's Largest Pecan Tree by the American Forestry Association. (Within months larger pecans were reported in Louisiana and Virginia.) It is also known that the location of the tree is atypical for the species; on a dry ridge outside the plant's native range. It stands thirty feet from the western branch of the Natchez Trace. The Trace was a trail between Natchez, Mississippi and Nashville, Tennessee linking the Mississippi, Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers and passing through land owned by the Cherokee, Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations. The Natchez Trace was a heavily used thoroughfare for frontier people and travelers in the first third of the nineteenth century. The pecan's position, out of it's usual range and beside a famous frontier trail, either coincides with or gave rise to a romantic traditional account of the tree's genesis from a seed brought by soldiers returning from the Battle of New Orleans and planted by early non-native settlers.

In 1935 the Natchez Trace Forest of Tennessee was founded by order of the New Deal's Resettlement Administration for the purpose of transferring poor land from farming to recreational, forestry and game preserve purposes. The old pecan, by then six feet in diameter with a limb spread of 120 feet, was recognized as a landmark within this new park. A 1936 pamphlet authored by the Resettlement Administration included an account of the tree's origin:

From a letter written by Mrs. Addie McCall of Huntington, Carroll County, Tennessee: "Quite a while ago I interviewed a very old citizen several times concerning early settlement of Caroll County, Tennessee.) At the time, twenty years ago, he was 95 years of age, I did not think these talks of sufficient importance to get them signed and certified. His father was one of the very first settlers of Caroll, County, and held position of trust. His testimony is gone now, except in my memory. This man's name was Morris. His story is as follows:

The first white people in Carroll County were in the district comprising the southeast corner of Carroll County, settling there before the territory was bought from the Indians. There was a road leading from the Tennessee River at old Reynoldsburg, near what is new Johnsonville, through what is now Carroll County and McNairy County over to Natchez, Mississippi. Since the settlement of Carroll County it has been known as the "Natchez Trace". It was called that because of the fact that some of Andrew Jackson's soldiers passed that way on their march to Natchez [before the Battle of New Orleans in 1815] and this road is supposed to be the real "Natchez Trace" over which most of Jackson's men did travel."

The troops camped near the home of Morris, and from a lot of pecans gave a few to Sooky Morris. She planted some of the nuts and from one of those grew the large pecan tree.

(Note that the account of soldiers offering pecan nuts to Sooky Morris is not quoted from the Addie McCall letter but is stated without attribution. This interpretation has become the favored version of events regarding the Natchez Trace Pecan.)

I have quoted above a government pamphlet from 1936 which quotes a letter written by a local historian who in turn recalled her memory of her interviews with a 95 year old settler conducted c.1916 who remembered a family story passed down one or more generations. This is more documentation than one often finds regarding local history however it remains a long convoluted journey back to the original seed planting event. The building blocks of the story, facts and embellishments, appear and dissolve through the blur of distant time.

As the remnants of Hurricane Rita howled over Tennessee on September 25, 2005, even the barely alive but very real pecan tree blew in and out of focus before my camera.

References:

Natchez Trace Forest LD-TN 6, Resettlement Administration Land Utilization Division, W.C. Kelley, project manager, Lexington, TN, 1936.
The West Tennessee Natchez Trace, Jonathan K. T. Smith, www.tngenweb.org/records/henderson/misc/gm6-05.htm, 2002.