Drakes United Methodist Church

Drakes sits where the Pearl River sometimes comes calling. In the Easter flood of April 1979, rain of 10 to 20 inches pushed the river about 15 feet over flood stage and drove more than 17,000 people from homes in Jackson, Flowood, Pearl and Richland; photographs of the church record the water line. Flowood won its incorporation in a court fight that the state Supreme Court settled in 1953. It counted 352 people in 1970 and 10,202 in 2020, and in 2009 voters approved resort status, allowing liquor by the glass.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Mississippi Civil Rights Museum — 5.3 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.
• Old Capitol Museum — 5.5 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 — 5.9 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.
• Tougaloo College — 6.5 mi
  A historically Black college north of Jackson, founded on a former plantation in 1869, whose students staged Mississippi's first sit-in and whose chapel hosted the movement's leaders.

More markers nearby

• Union Battery Position — 4.5 mi
• Eudora Welty House — 4.6 mi
• Belhaven University — 4.6 mi
• Gold Coast — 4.6 mi