Benton County Courthouse

Benton County was organized on July 15, 1870, during Reconstruction, from parts of Marshall and Tippah Counties, on land the Chickasaw gave up in the 1834 Treaty of Pontotoc. Locals named it for Senator Thomas H. Benton of Missouri. By various accounts that was cover, and they truly meant Confederate general Samuel Benton of Holly Springs. The seat, Ashland, takes its name from Henry Clay's Kentucky home. In 1900 only a tenth of Black farmers owned their land, against 57 percent of white farmers. In 1934 the county was among the first to receive Tennessee Valley Authority power.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Ida B. Wells-Barnett Museum — 16 mi
  The house in Holly Springs where Ida B. Wells was born into slavery in 1862, now a museum of African American history, art and culture.
• Rust College — 16 mi
  The first historically Black college founded in Mississippi, started in 1866 in a Holly Springs church by a formerly enslaved minister and a white Methodist clergyman.
• Big Hill Pond State Park — 29 mi
  A 4,000-acre bottomland park in McNairy County built around a pond that railroad crews dug in 1853, with a 70-foot tower over Dismal Swamp and Civil War earthworks.
• Brices Cross Roads National Battlefield Site — 34 mi
  The crossroads where Nathan Bedford Forrest routed a larger Union force in June 1864, and where Black regiments, many raised at Corinth, held the bridge that let most of the army escape.

More markers nearby

• Willie Mitchell — steps away
• Blue Mountain College — 14 mi
• William Clark Falkner — 15 mi
• Tippah County — 15 mi