Ellisville State School

Ellisville began with eight residents. When it opened in January 1921 as the Mississippi School and Colony for the Feebleminded, they were transferred from the state hospital, and its first building was a wood-frame commissary left by a lumber company. Women were not admitted until a dormitory was built in 1928. In 1990 the U.S. Justice Department sued the state after a 1985 investigation, citing inadequate medical care, medication practices and staffing, and unnecessary bodily restraints. A consent decree was signed the same day, and the case was dismissed in 1992.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Amos Deason House — 1.9 mi
  A Greek Revival house in Ellisville where a Confederate major was shot in 1863, tied to the history of the Free State of Jones.
• Lauren Rogers Museum of Art — 9.1 mi
  Mississippi's oldest art museum, a 1923 memorial to a timber heir in Laurel, with a major Native American basket collection and no admission fee since it opened.
• African American Military History Museum — 18 mi
  The wooden USO club that opened in March 1942 for Black soldiers training at Camp Shelby, now a museum of African American military service from the Revolutionary War to Iraq.
• Forrest County Courthouse and Dahmer Memorial — 18 mi
  The courthouse where Hattiesburg held Freedom Day on January 22, 1964, and where a memorial now honors Vernon Dahmer, killed by Klansmen in 1966.

More markers nearby

• JCJC Bobcats Defy Segregation — 1.1 mi
• Lynching of John Hartfield — 1.5 mi
• Ralph Boston — 6.9 mi
• Oak Park School — 7.4 mi