Itta Bena ("Home in the Woods")

Benjamin Grubb Humphreys bought land in Sunflower County in 1846 and set up a plantation at Roebuck Lake. He opposed secession, then raised the Sunflower Guards and rose to brigadier general, taking command of Barksdale's brigade after Gettysburg. Elected governor in 1865, he criticized lawmakers' attempts to push freed people back into peonage and shut them out of the courts, yet white Mississippians would not extend citizenship to freed people. Congress put the state under military law, and a military governor removed him in 1868. Humphreys County is named for him.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Bryant's Grocery — 13 mi
  The ruin of the Money store where Emmett Till was accused in August 1955, on private land beside the railroad, with a Mississippi Freedom Trail marker at the corner.
• B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center — 19 mi
  A museum built around the brick cotton gin in Indianola where B.B. King worked in the 1940s, with his grave in a memorial garden on the grounds.
• Fannie Lou Hamer Memorial Garden — 21 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.
• Carroll County Courthouse — 23 mi
  The courthouse in Carrollton where, on 17 March 1886, armed white men fired into a courtroom and killed about two dozen Black people, and no one was ever charged.

More markers nearby

• March Against Fear — 0.5 mi
• B.B. King Birthplace — 5.0 mi
• Guitar Slim — 6.5 mi
• Hubert Sumlin — 6.8 mi