Federals Occupy Rocky Springs

Rocky Springs began as a watering place on the old Natchez Trace, named for a spring and a rock outcrop. By 1860 it counted 2,616 residents and about 2,000 enslaved people, with merchants, physicians, teachers and a Methodist church from 1837. The Civil War started its decline; yellow fever in 1878, boll weevils and eroded fields finished it. The last store closed in 1930 and the spring dried up. On May 17, 1894, white men shot Amos Hicks, a Black man, in his home, reportedly suspecting him of burning a white man's buildings. The church still stands.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Vicksburg National Military Park — 18 mi
  A 16-mile tour road through the trenches of the 47-day siege of 1863, with a national cemetery and the story of the thousands of enslaved people who reached freedom behind Union lines.
• Old Court House Museum — 19 mi
  Vicksburg's Greek Revival courthouse of 1860, raised on a hilltop with the labor of enslaved artisans and now a private local-history museum heavy on Confederate relics.
• USS Cairo Gunboat and Museum — 20 mi
  The raised hull of a Union river ironclad sunk by a mine in the Yazoo in 1862, displayed at Vicksburg National Military Park with the artifacts the river mud preserved.
• Windsor Ruins — 21 mi
  Twenty-three standing Corinthian columns left by an 1890 fire, the largest antebellum mansion in Mississippi, built with enslaved labor on a 2,600-acre cotton plantation.

More markers nearby

• Fight for Hankinson's Ferry — 5.7 mi
• Site of the Hermitage — 9.9 mi
• Utica Normal and Industrial School — 12 mi
• Captain Brady Tonth, Jr. — 12 mi