Cotton Gin Port

The youngest man killed at the Alamo was born here. William Philip King came into the world at Cotton Gin Port on October 8, 1820, and at fifteen took his father's place in the relief party that left Gonzales in February 1836. He reportedly worked a cannon and was killed on March 6; King County, Texas, carries his name. The town he left had been a French staging ground in 1736 and 1752, then a crossing of the Gaines Trace, and the National Register listed the site in 1972. The railroad that founded Amory bypassed it.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Chickasaw Council House — 20 mi
  A roadside exhibit on the Natchez Trace Parkway marking the Chickasaw capital of the 1820s and the council house where the 1832 treaty of Pontotoc Creek ended Chickasaw title to Mississippi.
• Elvis Presley Birthplace — 21 mi
  The two-room house in East Tupelo where Elvis Presley was born in 1935, with a museum and the church building the family attended, set near the vanished Black neighborhoods where he first heard the blues.
• Tupelo National Battlefield — 22 mi
  A one-acre park on Main Street marking the July 1864 battle of Tupelo, a Union victory that kept Nathan Bedford Forrest away from Sherman's supply line, with Black soldiers among the defenders.
• Chickasaw Village Site — 23 mi
  A Chickasaw village on a remnant of the Black Belt Prairie beside the Natchez Trace Parkway, with house outlines marked on the ground and signs that speak in Chickasaw voices.

More markers nearby

• Bienville's Fort — 1.2 mi
• Amory, Mississippi: Blues from a Railroad Town — 2.4 mi
• Chickasaw Cession — 2.7 mi
• Athens — 9.2 mi