Claiborne County was created in 1802, and in 1803 Port Gibson, situated beside the Natchez Trace, became the county seat and was platted in 1811. Bayou Pierre gave the town access to the Mississippi River. During the...
The Yazoo River, formed by the confluence of the Yalobusha and Tallahatchie rivers at Greenwood, flows southwest toward Vicksburg, where it meets the Mississippi River. Its eastern bluffs rim the southeastern edge of the Yazoo-...
“The Gibraltar of the Confederacy,” “The Hill City,” “The River City”—Vicksburg’s nicknames emphasize its topography, its situation on one of the Mississippi River’s highest bluffs, and its lightweight glacial loess soil that erodes...
“The little town built crazily here on the edge of the hills,” in the words of Yazoo City’s most famous writer, Willie Morris, overlooks a sharp bend in the Yazoo River above the annual floodline. Laid out in 1830 as...
Founded as Holmes County’s seat in 1833, Lexington is dominated by the courthouse (YB41) on a square where two early roads meet, the east—west Tchula-Durant Road (MS 12) and the north-south Carrollton-Yazoo City Road (MS 17). An 1886...
Sharing county seat status with Vaiden, Carrollton was founded in 1835 after the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek transferred the traditional homeland of the Choctaw to Mississippi. Carrollton’s meandering streets...
By 1832, the Choctaw and Chickasaw tribes had ceded their land in Mississippi’s northwest quadrant to the federal government, but their ancestors had left their mark with hundreds of mounds that rise above the flat alluvial land. Mythologized...
By 1830, cotton planters from Natchez and from Kentucky and the Carolinas had discovered the high ground and cooling breezes around Lake Washington, an ancient oxbow lake seven miles long and a mile across created when the Mississippi River...
Platted in 1885 at the intersection of Deer Creek and the Louisville, New Orleans and Texas (later Illinois Central) Railroad, Leland has remained a small town. Industrial complexes, now largely dismantled, such as the Leland (Cotton) Oil...
Established in 1844, Greenville relocated in 1870 to a site two miles to the north. The town’s fortunes rose and fell with the Mississippi River and the price of cotton. Two railroads served the town: the east-west...
Cleveland was incorporated in 1886 along the new Louisville, New Orleans and Texas Railroad from Memphis to New Orleans. Commercial buildings face each other across the now-removed railroad tracks, and several have their foundations...
Named after John Clark, who settled along the Sunflower River in 1859, Clarksdale incorporated in 1882. The town grew into a shipping center for the northern Delta after the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad (Y&MV...
Incorporated on the banks of the Yazoo River in 1844, Greenwood became Leflore County’s seat in 1871. The town and the county took their name from Choctaw chief Greenwood Leflore, whose house Malmaison (burned 1942) once...
Once the land of the Chickasaw Indians, this region is bounded to the west by the Loess Bluff and extends eastward as pine- and hardwood-forested red clay hills. Memphis to the northwest has long been the locus of architects chosen to...
Holly Springs grew along a stagecoach line and then was made the county seat when the state legislature created Marshall County in 1836. What had been a linear development became a courthouse-square plan when new...
Founded in 1835 as the seat of Lafayette County, Oxford was named for the university town of Oxford, England, an echo intended to inspire Mississippi’s legislature to locate the state’s first university here, which it did in...
No area in the Mississippi has a more diverse topography than this one. In the state’s northeast corner rise the southwestern extremities of the Appalachians, an area with stone suitable for use in building. Southwest of this high ground...
Corinth developed as a transportation nexus when the east-west Memphis and Charleston Railroad was completed in 1857 and the north-south Mobile and Ohio in 1861. Anticipating this promising situation in 1855, entrepreneurs Houston...
In 1860 land speculators following the new Mobile and Ohio Railroad laid out a town on the Tupelo site, calling it Gum Pond for the stand of tupelo trees [then known locally as blackgums] around a small lake. In 1870 citizens incorporated...
The Black Belt of Alabama together with the Black Prairie of Mississippi is a crescent-shaped swath of fertile marly soil that sweeps west, then arcs north around the town of Macon and continues to the Tennessee state line. Settlers moving...
In 1836, two rival land companies purchased the Aberdeen townsite and laid out streets, but with grids askew. One syndicate led by Robert Gordon, who had come from Aberdeen, Scotland, established Old Aberdeen and reserved a block for a...
Columbus was laid out on the east bank of the Tombigbee River in 1821 after Plymouth, the area’s first settlement established in 1817 on the lower west bank, flooded. General Andrew Jackson’s Military Road arrived in 1820,...
Mississippi’s Central Hills region is mostly hilly, and agriculture never flourished in its mostly red clay soil. The area was long home to the Choctaw Indians, most of whom were relocated to present-day Oklahoma in 1830 by the U.S....
In 1836, the state legislature made Houston (named for Texan Sam Houston) the first county seat for Chickasaw County, and in 1837 surveyor Thomas Williams laid out the town on a grid plan with a courthouse square. While its companion...
Winona was established in 1860 along the north-south tracks of the Mississippi Central Railroad (later the Illinois Central). Summit Street runs east-west, and government and religious buildings are interspersed on the higher ground along...
In 1835, the state legislature formed Oktibbeha County and made Starkville the county seat, but it remained a village up to and through the Civil War. In 1878 solons chose land about one mile east of downtown as the location for...
Winston County was created in 1833, and Louisville was immediately designated the county seat. The town developed along Robinson Road, which was laid out in 1821 and connected Columbus to Jackson. Today most traffic...
The nine counties forming this region vary considerably in architectural intensity, from Lauderdale County, where the transportation hub of Meridian contains the state’s densest grouping of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century...
In 1855, Kemper County merchant John T. Ball and Alabama lawyer Lewis Ragsdale laid out separate town grids at angles to one another, with the grids meeting along what is today Meridian’s 6th Street. While locals called the area Sowashee...
Ceded to the State of Mississippi by the Choctaws in the Treaty of Doak’s Stand (1820), the fertile uplands of Hinds, Madison, and Rankin counties soon attracted planters. Jackson was laid out as the state capital in 1822, but...
