LeFleur's Bluff State Park, State park in Jackson, United States.
LeFleur's Bluff State Park lies on the banks of the Pearl River off Interstate 55 within Jackson's city limits. It holds a 50-acre lake, Mayes Lake, the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science and the Mississippi Children's Museum, completed in 2010. Its upland ridge, once farmland, is wooded and holds a nine-hole disc golf course; fossils from an inland sea that covered the site 50 to 60 million years ago can be found on the bluffs.
The land that became the park belonged to the Choctaw Nation until the 1830 Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, under which the Choctaw ceded their lands east of the Mississippi; many moved to present-day Oklahoma while others stayed in Mississippi. In 1821 the state legislature sent Thomas Hinds, James Patton and William Lattimore to find a central capital site; they reached LeFleur's Bluff, and on November 28, 1821 the assembly made it the permanent seat of Mississippi's government.
The park holds the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science, whose systematic collections exceed a million specimens of fish, reptiles, amphibians, birds, mammals, invertebrates, plants and fossils. Twenty-one outdoor nature exhibits lie within the park, including a native plant garden with swamp azalea, mountain laurel and spiderwort, and a prairie plot tended with minimal pesticides and fertilizers.
The park has an entrance gate with a vehicle fee and provides 28 campsites with hookups, primitive camping areas, and restroom facilities. The trails are generally level and accessible, making walks through different sections of the park straightforward for most visitors.
The park features outdoor nature exhibits designed to support native plant species, showing visitors what grows naturally in the region. There is also an accessible playground located between the pavilions at Mayes Lake for families to use.
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