Choccolocco Park lies within what was once the nineteenth-century Muscogee (Creek) Nation town of Choccolocco, a place where archaeologists have found evidence of Native American presence dating to about 8,000 BC and of long-term settlement beginning about 100 BC with the first work on an earthen mound. A stone mound along the trail was probably constructed about AD 500 and once stood on nearby Signal Mountain, and the earthen mound along the trail has been reconstructed to resemble its appearance about AD 1100. The history of the Choccolocco Valley reaches back to the Paleoindian period from 12,750 BC to 9,500 BC, when people of the Clovis Culture lived during the last ice age and crafted distinctive fluted spear points, followed by the Archaic period from 9,500 BC to 1,250 BC, when technological innovations and adaptation to the local environment made people less nomadic. During the Woodland period from 1,250 BC to AD 1000, people became more sedentary, established permanent communities, and created at the earthen mound the earliest known large-scale public works in the Choccolocco Valley. In the Mississippi period from AD 1000 to AD 1625, maize agriculture played an important role and construction resumed at the earthen mound as Native Americans undertook their most ambitious public works. From AD 1625 to AD 1730, after first exposure to Europeans beginning in A.D. 1540 during the expeditions of Hernando de Soto and Tristan de Luna, Mississippian people in the region experienced demographic collapse. By A.D. 1730, the Native people of the region had organized into the Muscogee (Creek) Nation to negotiate with European and later American governments, and this era ended in the 1830s when Muscogee (Creek) inhabitants were forcibly removed during the Trail of Tears. From AD 1832 to AD 1865, American settlers entered the region, developed the cotton economy, and built some of Alabama's earliest industrial iron furnaces, and from AD 1865 to the present, growing transportation and technology connections have made the valley's economy more complex while continuing to draw residents for the area's quality of life.