Holly Springs

The town was founded in 1836 on land the Chickasaw had held for centuries, ceded in the Treaty of Pontotoc Creek of 1832. Cotton plantations around it relied on enslaved labor, and many of the enslaved had been brought from the Upper South in the domestic slave trade, breaking up families. By 1837 it had twenty dry goods stores and three banks. Chalmers Institute, later the University of Holly Springs, became Mississippi's oldest university, and Jewish merchants lived there into the early twentieth century. The yellow fever of 1878 sickened about 1,400 people and killed about 300.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Ida B. Wells-Barnett Museum — 0.3 mi
  The house in Holly Springs where Ida B. Wells was born into slavery in 1862, now a museum of African American history, art and culture.
• Rust College — 0.6 mi
  The first historically Black college founded in Mississippi, started in 1866 in a Holly Springs church by a formerly enslaved minister and a white Methodist clergyman.
• Sardis Lake and Dam — 32 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

• Mississippi Central R.R. Campaign — steps away
• Yellow Fever House — steps away
• R. L. Burnside — steps away
• Junior Kimbrough — steps away