Coldwater

Coldwater was on the air before most of Mississippi. In 1923 the state was the only one without a radio station, and in 1924 the Commerce Department listed four, among them KFNG in Coldwater, with stations in Oxford, Hattiesburg and Pascagoula. All broadcast at ten watts, enough to cover a small town. Historian Dumas Malone, who would write the six-volume biography of Thomas Jefferson, was born here in 1892 to a Methodist minister and a teacher, though the family soon moved to Georgia. He later directed Harvard University Press.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sardis Lake and Dam — 22 mi
  A flood-control lake on the Little Tallahatchie, built from 1930s labor and a dredge named Pontotoc, with a dam that for years was the largest earth-filled dam in the world.
• Graceland — 25 mi
  Elvis Presley's 1939 limestone house in Whitehaven, bought in 1957 and opened as a ticketed museum in 1982, with his grave in the Meditation Garden and a commercial visitor campus around it.
• The Lyceum and the Circle, University of Mississippi — 34 mi
  The 1848 Greek Revival building at the center of the Ole Miss campus, where federal marshals held off a mob on 30 September 1962 and James Meredith registered the next morning.
• Oxford Square — 35 mi
  The courthouse square laid out in 1837 on land bought from a Chickasaw woman, rebuilt after the 1864 burning and home to Square Books and a memorial to Lafayette County's lynching victims.

More markers nearby

• Senatobia — 5.2 mi
• O. B. McClinton — 5.3 mi
• Sid Hemphill — 5.3 mi
• Jessie Mae Hemphill — 6.9 mi