Coffeeville

Coffeeville was a lawyers' town. Edward Cary Walthall opened a practice here in 1852, was elected district attorney in 1856 and briefly practiced with L. Q. C. Lamar, later Secretary of the Interior. Dunbar Rowland, a native of nearby Oakland, practiced law here until 1902, when he became the first director of the state archives. The courts served a county of two seats, Coffeeville and Water Valley, where in 1860 more than half the residents were enslaved. The first labor union in Mississippi, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, organized in Water Valley in 1869.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Holly Springs National Forest — 8.2 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.
• Casey Jones Railroad Museum — 12 mi
  The old Illinois Central depot in Water Valley, where Casey Jones worked in the 1890s, with a Mississippi Blues Trail marker for the songs written about his death in 1900.
• Grenada Freedom Movement Marker — 15 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.
• Enid Lake — 18 mi
  A Corps of Engineers lake on the Yocona River, finished in 1952 after farm families were moved off the valley floor, and the home water of a world-record white crappie.

More markers nearby

• Battle of Coffeeville — 1.0 mi
• Okachickima — 3.8 mi
• Casey Jones — 12 mi
• Hubert Creekmore — 13 mi