Egypt Station

On December 21, 1864, Benjamin Grierson led about 3,500 Union cavalry out of Memphis to cut the Mobile and Ohio Railroad behind John Bell Hood's retreating army. After burning the depot and stores at Verona, the column rode south, and on December 28 it attacked Confederate defenders at Egypt Station, who held a train with four guns. About 500 men surrendered at a wooden stockade, and the 3rd U.S. Colored Cavalry helped take it. Grierson reached Vicksburg on January 5 with some 600 prisoners and 1,000 people who had escaped slavery. Hood's hungry army found its supplies wrecked.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Chickasaw Council House — 18 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.
• Howlin' Wolf Memorial and Blues Trail Marker — 21 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.
• Tupelo National Battlefield — 25 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.
• Waverley Mansion — 26 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.

More markers nearby

• Prairie — 7.9 mi
• Gulf Ordnance Plant — 8.0 mi
• Battle of Okolona — 8.3 mi
• Okolona College — 8.4 mi