Dunbar Rowland (1864-1937)

Rowland was a lawyer in Memphis and Coffeeville with no training as a historian when the trustees of the new archives department chose him in March 1902 as its first director. He crossed to England, France, Spain and Cuba to transcribe documents and built what he called the Mississippi Plan, a state-run archive, at a time when private societies held records elsewhere. It became a model across the South. His output topped forty volumes, including the papers of Jefferson Davis. Historians note his strong Confederate sympathies and that he gave little attention to Black or female Mississippians.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Enid Lake — 6.4 mi
  A Corps of Engineers lake on the Yocona River, finished in 1952 after farm families were moved off the valley floor, and the home water of a world-record white crappie.
• Holly Springs National Forest — 7.4 mi
  A patchwork national forest of about 155,000 acres in the north Mississippi hills, assembled in the 1930s from worn-out cotton fields and replanted in pine by the Civilian Conservation Corps.
• Casey Jones Railroad Museum — 17 mi
  The old Illinois Central depot in Water Valley, where Casey Jones worked in the 1890s, with a Mississippi Blues Trail marker for the songs written about his death in 1900.
• Grenada Freedom Movement Marker — 20 mi
  The Mississippi Freedom Trail marker at Line and Green streets for the 1966 Grenada movement, when Black children entering white schools were beaten by a mob and 13 white men were arrested.

More markers nearby

• Okachickima — 14 mi
• Coffeeville — 14 mi
• Battle of Coffeeville — 15 mi
• Hubert Creekmore — 17 mi