Franklin Academy

Columbus's free school was never one school. Union Academy began in 1865 in a warehouse for Black students, and in 1877 it was set up as a department of Franklin Academy under a bill from J. E. Leigh. That same year its teachers were driven out of the area, as happened elsewhere in Mississippi at the end of Reconstruction. William Isaac Mitchell became its first Black principal in 1878; he died in 1916 and lies in Sandfield Cemetery. Franklin itself, founded in 1821, is called the state's oldest public elementary school.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Tennessee Williams Welcome Center — 0.2 mi
  The 1875 Episcopal rectory where Tennessee Williams was born in 1911, moved to Main Street in the 1990s and now Columbus's welcome center and a National Literary Landmark.
• Waverley Mansion — 6.6 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.
• Howlin' Wolf Memorial and Blues Trail Marker — 15 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.
• Sam D. Hamilton Noxubee National Wildlife Refuge — 26 mi
  A 48,000-acre refuge of bottomland forest and lakes in Noxubee, Oktibbeha and Winston counties, rebuilt from worn-out farmland, with red-cockaded woodpeckers, alligators and winter eagles.

More markers nearby

• Gleed's Corner — steps away
• S. D. Lee Home — steps away
• Friendship Cemetery — 0.2 mi
• Columbus, Mississippi Blues — 0.3 mi