Freedmen Town

Lafayette County counted more than 7,000 enslaved people in 1860, and after the war many of their families bought homes here. The first school opened in 1867 under the Freedmen's Bureau, taught by the preacher Alexander Phillips, who later taught at the Oxford Female Colored School in 1874-75. The streets held small shotgun houses of about three rooms. Urban renewal, expanded by the 1949 Housing Act, bought out families, tore down older houses and scattered the neighborhood, though residents say it remains roughly 90 percent Black.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Oxford Square — 0.3 mi
  The courthouse square laid out in 1837 on land bought from a Chickasaw woman, rebuilt after the 1864 burning and home to Square Books and a memorial to Lafayette County's lynching victims.
• Rowan Oak — 0.5 mi
  William Faulkner's Greek Revival house in Oxford, bought in 1930 and kept by the University of Mississippi, with the outline of A Fable still written on his study wall.
• The Lyceum and the Circle, University of Mississippi — 0.7 mi
  The 1848 Greek Revival building at the center of the Ole Miss campus, where federal marshals held off a mob on 30 September 1962 and James Meredith registered the next morning.
• Sardis Lake and Dam — 16 mi
  A flood-control lake on the Little Tallahatchie, built from 1930s labor and a dredge named Pontotoc, with a dam that for years was the largest earth-filled dam in the world.

More markers nearby

• Burns "Belfry" Church — steps away
• Theora Hamblett House — steps away
• St. Peter's (1851), Episcopal — steps away
• Delta Gamma Fraternity — 0.2 mi