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 Mitchell and Hamilton Mask laid out a grid-plan for a town at the railroads’ point of intersection and initially called it Cross City. Corinth’s railroads became a target for Union forces in 1862 as part of the Western Campaign, which began in April with the two-day battle at Shiloh just across the Tennessee border to the north. The following October, a Union army occupying the town won the Battle of Corinth and remained in the area until 1864. (The Civil War Interpretive Center is at 501 W. Linden Street.) Wartime damage was significant but not catastrophic, and Corinth recovered relatively quickly. Railroads again prospered, eventually making the town a center for trade in yellow pine lumber harvested in the southern part of the state. Cotton and woolen mills arrived from the 1870s, as did foundries and machine shops, though only the Corinth Clothing Manufacturing Company building (NE8) remains intact from this period of industrial construction. Today Corinth is a highway nexus, and its factories produce wood products and machinery such as diesel engines.
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