Camp McCain

Camp McCain held two kinds of men in uniform. Besides training soldiers, it was one of Mississippi's four base camps for prisoners of war, with Camp Clinton, Camp Como and Camp Shelby. About twenty thousand German and Italian captives were interned in the state, most of them from Rommel's Afrika Korps. A base camp was built for three thousand men, fenced into compounds of a thousand, and branch camps, one near Belzoni, put prisoners to work in Delta cotton. Historians also record serious racial disturbances at McCain, hushed up at the time. The camp closed with the war.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Grenada Freedom Movement Marker — 7.0 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.
• Winona: Fannie Lou Hamer and the Montgomery County Jail — 14 mi
  Two Freedom Trail stops in Winona for 9 June 1963, when Fannie Lou Hamer and other voting-rights workers were arrested at the bus depot and beaten in the Montgomery County Jail.
• Carroll County Courthouse — 16 mi
  The courthouse in Carrollton where, on 17 March 1886, armed white men fired into a courtroom and killed about two dozen Black people, and no one was ever charged.
• Holly Springs National Forest — 20 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.

More markers nearby

• 87th Infantry Division — 2.6 mi
• Lucie E. Campbell — 4.8 mi
• Lynching of Bootjack and Red — 4.8 mi
• Magic Sam — 6.0 mi