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 are the northern reaches of the Black Prairie, then the higher Pontotoc Ridge. In the mid-nineteenth century, railroads made Corinth, Tupelo, and Iuka into transportation centers, but the rail lines also gave these communities strategic significance during the Civil War that made them sites for notable battles. After the war, textile mills and manufacturing shops were built in Tupelo and Corinth. In the 1930s, the development of hydroelectric dams on the Tennessee River by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) enabled Tupelo to become the first Mississippi town supplied with TVA power, and the town is today the most prosperous in the area, with a regional medical center and an automobile assembly plant in nearby Blue Springs. A drive through the region on the Natchez Trace Parkway provides travelers with dramatically changing vistas, from the cultivated fields in the southwest, to the battlefields near Tupelo, to the rising, rock-outcropped topography farther northeast, and finally to the Tennessee River.
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