Columbus

The town began as a river crossing. When soldiers cut Andrew Jackson's Military Road toward New Orleans between 1817 and 1820, a surveyor picked this stretch of the Tombigbee, with high ground on both banks, for a ferry. Cotton planters made the place rich on enslaved labor. After Shiloh in 1862 the wounded filled its hospitals, and thousands were buried in Friendship Cemetery. Its antebellum houses came through the war, and spring pilgrimage tours still open some of them. Today about 64 percent of the city's roughly 24,000 residents are Black.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Tennessee Williams Welcome Center — steps away
  The 1875 Episcopal rectory where Tennessee Williams was born in 1911, moved to Main Street in the 1990s and now Columbus's welcome center and a National Literary Landmark.
• Waverley Mansion — 6.6 mi
  A National Historic Landmark mansion above the Tombigbee River, home of a plantation family that enslaved more than a hundred people, left empty for half a century before a family restored it.
• Howlin' Wolf Memorial and Blues Trail Marker — 14 mi
  A Mississippi Blues Trail marker and granite memorial on East Broad Street honoring Chester Burnett, who was born nearby in 1910 and became the Chicago blues giant Howlin' Wolf.
• Sam D. Hamilton Noxubee National Wildlife Refuge — 26 mi
  A 48,000-acre refuge of bottomland forest and lakes in Noxubee, Oktibbeha and Winston counties, rebuilt from worn-out farmland, with red-cockaded woodpeckers, alligators and winter eagles.

More markers nearby

• Robinson Road — steps away
• Confederate Decoration Day — steps away
• Columbus, Mississippi Blues — steps away
• Gleed's Corner — 0.3 mi