Battle of Coffeeville

Coffeeville was a small Confederate victory that mattered out of proportion. On 5 December 1862 Confederate troops under Mansfield Lovell hid in woods along the Water Valley road and ambushed Union cavalry at about half past two, driving them back some three miles toward Grant's column before returning to their lines. Fighting lasted until dark. Estimates of Union losses range from about a hundred to over three hundred killed, wounded and captured, against roughly sixty Confederate casualties. The result halted Grant's advance, and he pulled his army back to Oxford. William Baldwin's brigade was in the fight.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Holly Springs National Forest — 9.0 mi
  A patchwork national forest of about 155,000 acres in the north Mississippi hills, assembled in the 1930s from worn-out cotton fields and replanted in pine by the Civilian Conservation Corps.
• Casey Jones Railroad Museum — 12 mi
  The old Illinois Central depot in Water Valley, where Casey Jones worked in the 1890s, with a Mississippi Blues Trail marker for the songs written about his death in 1900.
• Grenada Freedom Movement Marker — 16 mi
  The Mississippi Freedom Trail marker at Line and Green streets for the 1966 Grenada movement, when Black children entering white schools were beaten by a mob and 13 white men were arrested.
• Enid Lake — 18 mi
  A Corps of Engineers lake on the Yocona River, finished in 1952 after farm families were moved off the valley floor, and the home water of a world-record white crappie.

More markers nearby

• Coffeeville — 1.0 mi
• Okachickima — 4.8 mi
• Casey Jones — 12 mi
• Hubert Creekmore — 12 mi