Crystal Springs

The town was laid out about 1858, a mile and a half west of the old settlement, when the railroad came through. Its fortune came from the garden. In 1870 James Sturgis shipped the first peaches to New Orleans and Chicago. N. Piazza brought tomato seed from Italy, when tomatoes were still called love apples, and began cultivating them with S. H. Stackhouse. German immigrant Augustus Lotterhos pooled several growers' crops and in 1878 sent the first boxcar load of tomatoes to Denver. Crystal Springs grew into one of the largest tomato shipping centers.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Old Capitol Museum — 24 mi
  Mississippi's Greek Revival statehouse of 1839, where the legislature voted to secede, Hiram Revels was elected to the U.S. Senate and the 1890 constitution was written, now a free state museum.
• Farish Street Historic District — 24 mi
  Jackson's Black business and cultural center, where Medgar Evers kept the NAACP office and furniture-store owners recorded the blues, now a quiet National Register district.
• Mississippi Civil Rights Museum — 24 mi
  A state museum in downtown Jackson, opened in 2017 beside the Museum of Mississippi History, that tells the movement from 1945 to 1970 through the people who made it.
• Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument — 26 mi
  A modest ranch house in Jackson's Elraine neighborhood where Medgar Evers was shot in the driveway in 1963, now a unit of the National Park Service.

More markers nearby

• Tommy Johnson — steps away
• Bus-Train Collision of 1942 — steps away
• P.T.A. Birthplace — 0.9 mi
• Robert Johnson Birthplace — 9.0 mi