Memphis, explained
Big Hill Pond is a Tennessee state park in the far southwest of the state, in McNairy County near the small community of Pocahontas. The “area” is the park itself and the rural stretch of county around it — swamp forest along Cypress Creek, a man-made pond, a trail network, and a location close to … Read more
Pickwick Landing is the name given to a dam, the lake it created, and the Tennessee state park built around it, on the Tennessee River in Hardin County, Tennessee, near the town of Savannah. It sits roughly 110 miles southeast of Memphis, close enough to Shiloh National Military Park to be visited on the same … Read more
Discovery Park of America is a museum and outdoor heritage park in Union City, Tennessee, roughly 100 miles north of Memphis. A single large exhibit building holds galleries on subjects from natural history to space exploration and military history, and a surrounding campus of historic structures and outdoor exhibits sits alongside it. Where is Discovery … Read more
Helena, Arkansas is a small river town about 70 miles south of Memphis, on the Mississippi’s west bank in Phillips County. It matters to Memphis visitors for two connected reasons: it is where the daily blues radio show King Biscuit Time has aired since 1941, and it hosts the King Biscuit Blues Festival, a major … Read more
Reelfoot Lake is a shallow, cypress-studded lake in the northwest corner of Tennessee, straddling Lake and Obion counties. It exists because the New Madrid earthquakes of 1811–12 dropped a section of land low enough that nearby streams backed up and filled the basin. The result is a natural lake barely two centuries old — young … Read more
Shiloh National Military Park is a National Park Service site in Hardin County, Tennessee, that preserves the ground where the Battle of Shiloh was fought on April 6 and 7, 1862. It includes a visitor center, a self-guided tour road with monuments, and the Shiloh National Cemetery. It sits about two hours from Memphis by … Read more
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
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