LeFleur's Bluff State Park

About this park

LeFleur's Bluff State Park occupies 305 acres of genuinely urban woodland within the city limits of Jackson, taking its name from Louis LeFleur, a French-Canadian explorer and trader who established a trading post on the banks of the Pearl River here in the late 1700s; the city of Jackson itself was originally known as "LeFleur's Bluff" before it became Mississippi's capital. On November 28, 1821, the state assembly specifically chose this location to become the permanent seat of Mississippi's government, a decision that makes the park's grounds genuinely foundational to the state's political history. The park's bluffs preserve a far older geological record as well: fifty to sixty million years ago, the area now occupied by the park sat beneath an inland sea, and fossils from that ancient marine environment can still be found eroding out of the park's exposed bluff faces today. That combination of deep geological time and early American political history gives LeFleur's Bluff a layered significance rarely found in a park this close to a major downtown core. Today the park houses the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science, founded in 1932 by Fannye Cook and now the largest museum in the state, alongside the separately operated Mississippi Children's Museum, both clustered near the park's western entrance off Museum Drive. Fifty-acre Mayes Lake anchors the park's more conventional outdoor recreation, offering fishing and boating alongside an 18-hole disc golf course, nature trails, camping, and a nine-hole public golf course, making LeFleur's Bluff a genuinely rare combination of big-city museum district and functioning state park within a single set of gates.