Camp Van Dorn

Two infantry divisions, the 99th and the 63rd, trained here for Europe on 41,844 acres south of Centreville. The camp also held the 364th Infantry, a segregated Black regiment sent in May 1943 after violence at its Arizona post. On May 30 the Wilkinson County sheriff shot Private William Walker dead in Centreville, and a company of the 364th broke into a supply room for guns. Rumors later said more than a thousand of its men were killed; the Army's 1999 investigation found no documentary evidence that any unexplained loss of personnel occurred.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Audubon State Historic Site — 24 mi
  Oakley House, where Audubon taught drawing and painted 32 birds in 1821, and the two cabins behind it where four Black families lived through slavery, Reconstruction and Jim Crow.
• Homochitto National Forest — 25 mi
  A 191,839-acre national forest in seven southwest Mississippi counties, replanted by the Civilian Conservation Corps, with Clear Springs and the 1,075-acre Okhissa Lake.
• Clark Creek Natural Area — 26 mi
  A 700-acre ravine preserve in the Tunica Hills with about 50 waterfalls on loess bluffs, reached by a 4.9-mile loop trail, foot traffic only.
• Rosedown Plantation State Historic Site — 26 mi
  A cotton plantation worked by hundreds of enslaved people, whose names survive in an 1862 succession list; the Turnbull house and gardens, and the quarters nobody has yet found.

More markers nearby

• Carnot Posey Home — 13 mi
• The Woodville Republican — 14 mi
• Fort Adams — 14 mi
• William Grant Still — 14 mi