Greasy Street

Ruleville is a railroad creation. J. W. Rule laid out the village in 1898, and a Yazoo and Mississippi Valley stop made it a cotton shipping point for the plantations around it. In 1899 about 150 residents sent a petition with 98 signatures asking the governor to incorporate it. In 1964, during Freedom Summer, a Freedom School opened here as an alternative to the second-class education offered to Black students. The Greasy Street marker stands at West Floyce Street and North Front Street.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fannie Lou Hamer Memorial Garden — 0.9 mi
  The small park on Byron Street in Ruleville where Fannie Lou Hamer is buried beside her husband, with a Freedom Trail marker and a 2012 bronze statue.
• Dockery Farms — 3.6 mi
  The plantation on the Sunflower River where Charley Patton lived and played from about 1900, now a working farm, a National Register district and a Mississippi Blues Trail stop.
• Parchman Farm (Mississippi State Penitentiary) — 14 mi
  The state penitentiary on Sunflower County cotton land, built in 1900 as a prison plantation, where Freedom Riders were held in 1961; a working prison with no visits and a Blues Trail marker at its gate.
• Mound Bayou — 15 mi
  The Bolivar County town founded in 1887 by men who had been enslaved at Davis Bend, built to be Black-owned, home of Taborian Hospital and a museum on Roosevelt Street.

More markers nearby

• Jimmy Rogers — steps away
• Staple Singers — 6.0 mi
• The Cleveland Chinese Mission School — 9.3 mi
• Chrisman Street — 9.6 mi