Elijah Pierce

Elijah Pierce was born on a Baldwyn farm on March 5, 1892, the youngest son of a man who had been enslaved. He began carving at seven with a pocketknife his father gave him, learned more from an uncle, started barbering in 1908 and earned a Baptist preacher's license in 1920. He settled in Columbus, Ohio, in 1923 to work as a barber. His favorite work was the Book of Wood, a large carved book telling the story of Jesus. The Columbus Museum of Art now holds over 300 of his pieces.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Brices Cross Roads National Battlefield Site — 5.3 mi
  The crossroads where Nathan Bedford Forrest routed a larger Union force in June 1864, and where Black regiments, many raised at Corinth, held the bridge that let most of the army escape.
• Natchez Trace Parkway Visitor Center — 13 mi
  The parkway's headquarters and official visitor center near Tupelo, with a film, a small museum of the Old Trace and the surviving New Deal houses of the Tupelo Homesteads.
• Chickasaw Village Site — 17 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.
• Elvis Presley Birthplace — 17 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.

More markers nearby

• George Wardlaw — steps away
• James Harrison "Babe" McCarthy — steps away
• Private John Allen — 1.0 mi
• Battle of Booneville — 10 mi