Booneville Armory

At about 8 p.m. on December 22, 1950, Company B of the 198th Tank Battalion, Mississippi National Guard, was cleaning weapons in the armory washroom when fumes, probably from gasoline, reached an open-flame heater. Seven men died: William Howard Duncan, Charles Owen Fugitt, Freddie Fulghum, Lawrence Sidney Burks, Billy Wade Mooney, James Ray Robinson and Hugh Thomas Weatherbee, three of them 18 years old. The unit was due to be called up on January 16, 1951, and left within weeks for two years of service. A granite monument was dedicated on the site in 2006.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Brices Cross Roads National Battlefield Site — 14 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.
• Corinth Civil War Interpretive Center — 19 mi
  A Park Service center at Battery Robinett telling why two railroads made Corinth a prize, from the siege of 1862 to the battle of October, and what happened to the people who sought freedom there.
• Corinth Contraband Camp — 19 mi
  The site of a Union-run town of freedom seekers in 1862 and 1863, with a quarter-mile walkway of life-size bronze figures and the origin of a Black regiment that fought at Brices Cross Roads.
• Tishomingo State Park — 22 mi
  A Civilian Conservation Corps park around Bear Creek's sandstone canyon at milepost 304 of the Natchez Trace Parkway, with a swinging bridge and cliffs found nowhere else in Mississippi.

More markers nearby

• Booneville — 0.3 mi
• Council of War — 0.8 mi
• Capture of Booneville — 0.9 mi
• Battle of Booneville — 1.4 mi