This small county seat, incorporated in 1830, gained national attention in 1969 when Charles Evers, brother of civil rights martyr Medgar Evers, became the first African American mayor of a town in Mississippi (outside the all-black town of Mound Bayou) since Reconstruction. The one-story, brick, modernist city hall was only four years old when Evers took his historic oath of office on its steps. On the front lawn is the stone marker to Medgar Evers erected by Charles Evers.
Next door is the former Thomas Hinds Lodge (1844), one of the state’s oldest surviving Masonic lodges. The two-story brick building housed the Presbyterian congregation on its first floor. The pointed-arched windows were installed around 1900.