Aberdeen

Hiram Revels died in Aberdeen. The first African American to serve in the U.S. Senate, elected by the Mississippi legislature in 1870 and sworn in on February 25 of that year, was attending a church conference here when he died on January 16, 1901; he is buried in Holly Springs. Aberdeen was one of the state's busiest river ports and once its second-largest city, and the Magnolias, built in 1850, is its best-known antebellum house. Spring pilgrimages still open the old homes. By the 2020 census about 71 percent of residents were Black.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Howlin' Wolf Memorial and Blues Trail Marker — 16 mi
  A Mississippi Blues Trail marker and granite memorial on East Broad Street honoring Chester Burnett, who was born nearby in 1910 and became the Chicago blues giant Howlin' Wolf.
• Waverley Mansion — 18 mi
  A National Historic Landmark mansion above the Tombigbee River, home of a plantation family that enslaved more than a hundred people, left empty for half a century before a family restored it.
• Tennessee Williams Welcome Center — 24 mi
  The 1875 Episcopal rectory where Tennessee Williams was born in 1911, moved to Main Street in the 1990s and now Columbus's welcome center and a National Literary Landmark.
• Chickasaw Council House — 27 mi
  A roadside exhibit on the Natchez Trace Parkway marking the Chickasaw capital of the 1820s and the council house where the 1832 treaty of Pontotoc Creek ended Chickasaw title to Mississippi.

More markers nearby

• Dr. W.A. Evans — steps away
• Reuben Davis — 0.3 mi
• Aberdeen Mississippi Blues — 0.4 mi
• DeSoto Expedition — 0.6 mi