This two-story Italianate brick commercial building is the only surviving component of the once extensive Mississippi Mills, a wool and cotton mill founded as Mississippi Manufacturing Company in 1866 by Colonel James M. Wesson. From the 1870s to the early 1890s under the ownership of Mississippi’s “Cotton King,” Edmund Richardson, the company became the largest in the state and by the 1880s included three multistory buildings on Factory Street’s north side. These operated day and night using electricity generated on site and employing around 1,200 people, making Wesson the largest Mississippi town between Jackson and New Orleans. Dunbar Rowland’s Encyclopedia of Mississippi History (1907) noted the wide range of materials shipped out on the Illinois Central Railroad, including cashmere, denim, tweed, flannel, cotton rope, and sewing thread. Even as he wrote, however, the mill was in receivership due to absentee management, labor troubles, and a variety of economic factors, and it closed in 1910. The mill buildings were disassembled during World War I, leaving only this warehouse and shipping building, which later became the Wesson Bank and Post Office and is now an antiques mall.