Memphis, explained
Access Memphis Editorial Team 
Holly Springs, Mississippi is the seat of Marshall County, roughly 45 miles southeast of Memphis via US-78/I-22, just south of the Tennessee line. It is a small courthouse town built on land taken from the Chickasaw in the 1830s, notable today for a dense concentration of pre-Civil War buildings, a historically Black college, and its … Read more
Oxford, Mississippi is a small university town about 75 miles southeast of Memphis, built around a 19th-century courthouse square. It is the seat of Lafayette County and the home of the University of Mississippi (widely known as Ole Miss), and it is where the writer William Faulkner lived and set much of his fiction. Where … Read more
The Mississippi Delta is not the delta at the river’s mouth — that landform is 400 miles further south, near the Gulf of Mexico. This “Delta” is a flat, historically flooded farming region in northwest Mississippi, roughly between Memphis and Vicksburg. It begins, depending on who is measuring, either at a specific river bluff or … Read more
Clarksdale is a small city in the Mississippi Delta, about 75 miles south of Memphis on U.S. Highway 61, and the seat of Coahoma County. It draws blues listeners because a disproportionate number of the musicians who shaped Delta blues — Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Sam Cooke, Ike Turner among them — were born … Read more
Tunica is a county and small town in the Mississippi Delta, roughly 30 miles south of Memphis, that became one of the largest casino markets in the United States after Mississippi legalized dockside gambling in 1990. Today it holds a smaller but still active casino strip, a river museum, and a documented history of extreme … Read more
The Riverline is the name Memphis River Parks Partnership uses for its long-term plan to connect the city’s separate riverfront parks into one continuous trail for walking and cycling, running roughly from the northern edge of Downtown to the bluffs south of the Memphis and Arkansas Memorial Bridge. Most of it is not built yet. … Read more
===ARTICLE-BODY-BELOW=== What actually lives along the Memphis riverfront? The Memphis riverfront is a run of parks, bridges and civic landmarks strung along Riverside Drive above the Mississippi River, plus the river itself — a working channel that carries barge traffic, migratory birds and fish that never make it into a brochure. It is both a … Read more
Swimming in the open Mississippi at Memphis is not something regional safety agencies recommend, and there is no supervised beach for it — the current, undertow and heavy barge traffic make the open channel genuinely hazardous. Recreational boating does happen, but mostly in the calmer slack water beside downtown rather than the main river channel … Read more
T.O. Fuller State Park is a state-managed park inside the Memphis city limits, in the far southwest of the city near the Mississippi River. It covers roughly 1,100 acres of bluff and bottomland forest, and it is historically significant as one of the first state parks in the United States developed for use by African … Read more
Meeman-Shelby Forest State Park is a large, forested Tennessee state park on the Chickasaw Bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River, roughly 13 miles north of Downtown Memphis in Shelby County. It is managed by Tennessee State Parks and holds hiking and horse trails, a campground, cabins, and a stocked lake — not a garden or a … Read more
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