Just outside town, along the Trace, you'll find Emerald Mound, the grassy ruins of a Native American city that includes the second-largest pre-Columbian earthworks in the US. Using stone tools, pre-Columbian ancestors to the Natchez people graded this eight-acre mountain into a flat-topped pyramid. It is now the second-largest mound site in America. There are shady, creekside picnic spots here, and you can and should climb to the top, where you'll find a vast lawn.
On this fuzzy plain, there's a diagram of what the temple may have looked like back in its day. The Mound complex makes for a great diversion on an easy spring afternoon just before the sun smolders, when birdsong chimes in from the trees and mingles with the call of a distant train.
