Blue Springs

Blue Springs was established in 1888 as a stop along the Kansas City, Memphis and Birmingham Railroad, in what is now Union County. Many of its first residents came from the older nearby community of Ellistown, which the railroad had bypassed. The same line shifted Myrtle, also in Union County, northward in the 1880s, so one railroad reshaped two settlements in the county within a few years. A Toyota plant now stands not far from Blue Springs.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Natchez Trace Parkway Visitor Center — 11 mi
  The parkway's headquarters and official visitor center near Tupelo, with a film, a small museum of the Old Trace and the surviving New Deal houses of the Tupelo Homesteads.
• Chickasaw Village Site — 11 mi
  A Chickasaw village on a remnant of the Black Belt Prairie beside the Natchez Trace Parkway, with house outlines marked on the ground and signs that speak in Chickasaw voices.
• Brices Cross Roads National Battlefield Site — 12 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.
• Tupelo National Battlefield — 12 mi
  A one-acre park on Main Street marking the July 1864 battle of Tupelo, a Union victory that kept Nathan Bedford Forrest away from Sherman's supply line, with Black soldiers among the defenders.

More markers nearby

• Roma Wilson & Leon Pinson — 9.6 mi
• William Faulkner — 10 mi
• Union County, Mississippi — 10 mi
• Mosley and Johnson — 10 mi