Gleed's Corner

Robert Gleed was born into slavery in Virginia in 1836. Before the war, a 1931 county history says, Columbus officers arrested him as a runaway and sold him to the highest bidder. He served in the state senate from 1870 to 1875, and in 1872 a crowd of white men forced him out of a segregated railroad car. When violence marked his run for sheriff in 1875 he moved his family to Texas. He died in Harris County in 1916 and lies in Sandfield Cemetery with his wife Susan.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Tennessee Williams Welcome Center — steps away
  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

• Franklin Academy — steps away
• Friendship Cemetery — steps away
• Columbus, Mississippi Blues — steps away
• S. D. Lee Home — 0.2 mi