Chickasaw State Park

🏆 Official Guide: Chickasaw State Park — a New Deal-era park on some of the highest ground in West Tennessee: 1,280 recreation acres inside a 14,384-acre state forest, two 54-acre lakes, 13 cabins (seven of them historic WPA cabins), three campgrounds including a 32-site wrangler camp, and free admission. Details verified against Tennessee State Parks as of August 2026.

Pines are the first thing you notice at Chickasaw State Park — tall loblolly and shortleaf pines that turn the cabin lanes into shaded corridors and drop needles on the sand beach at Lake Placid. The park sits along the border of Hardeman and Chester counties, 30 minutes from Jackson, on terrain that counts as high country for West Tennessee. It is named for the Chickasaw people who once lived across West Tennessee and North Mississippi, and it was one of the state’s 20 New Deal-era parks; the territory formally became a state park in 1955, when park duties and forest lands were deeded to the state. The park covers roughly 3,000 years of human history on its interpretive programs, and the surrounding Chickasaw State Forest adds hundreds of miles of roads and horse trails beyond the park boundary.

Visitor Information

Lake Placid and Lake Lajoie

The park has two 54-acre lakes. Lake Placid is the centerpiece, open to the public year-round for fishing and paddling. The boat dock runs Memorial Day through the first weekend in August, then weekends only through October 16, and rents kayaks, canoes, stand-up paddleboards and pedal boats; you can launch your own canoe or kayak from the dock year-round. Lake Lajoie is the quieter second lake. Both provide year-round fishing for bass, bream and catfish, with fishing boats for rent and length and creel limits posted at the lake.

Trails

All trails are natural surface, and the whole network adds up to more than four miles of easy-to-moderate walking — this is a park for a morning loop, not an all-day trek.

Riders have five miles of horse trail inside the park and hundreds of miles more in the adjacent state forest. Chickasaw Riding Stables, a family-run concessionaire, offers horse rentals, guided rides and stall rentals for wrangler-camp guests (731-609-6562). Cyclists can use the park roads and the forest roads beyond; the park rates the riding as intermediate.

Cabins and Camping

Every campground has a playground. Bring only heat-treated or park-collected firewood — Tennessee State Parks asks that untreated wood stay out of the park to slow forest pests.

Golf and Birding

Adjacent to the park is an 18-hole, par-72 Jack Nicklaus Signature Design course, run by a concessionaire, laid out through the forest without a house in sight. Birders have recorded 100 species in the park’s mixed hardwood and pine forest.

Frequently Asked Questions

More parks nearby: Big Hill Pond State Park lies to the southwest near the Mississippi line, and Pickwick Landing State Park sits on the Tennessee River to the southeast.

Editorial note: Facts above come from Tennessee State Parks (tnstateparks.com) park, camping, cabin and activities pages. Some pages were last retrievable in archived form (2022–2023); cabin rates and dock dates may have changed — confirm on the official site before you book.