James Ford

James Ford was born in Water Valley in 1911 and grew up in Clinton. In 1927, as a teenager out of high school, he was hired by the Mississippi Department of Archives and History to investigate Native sites and spent summers on fieldwork at some of the state's most important ones. In 1940 and 1941 he teamed with Philip Phillips and James Griffin on a survey of the Lower Mississippi Valley, whose 1951 report is still the region's founding archaeological text. He was a founder of the Southeastern Archaeological Conference.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Casey Jones Railroad Museum — steps away
  The old Illinois Central depot in Water Valley, where Casey Jones worked in the 1890s, with a Mississippi Blues Trail marker for the songs written about his death in 1900.
• Rowan Oak — 16 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.
• Enid Lake — 16 mi
  A Corps of Engineers lake on the Yocona River, finished in 1952 after farm families were moved off the valley floor, and the home water of a world-record white crappie.
• The Lyceum and the Circle, University of Mississippi — 16 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.

More markers nearby

• Casey Jones — steps away
• Hubert Creekmore — steps away
• Theora Hamblett — 9.3 mi
• Battle of Coffeeville — 12 mi