John Crowe Ransom

John Crowe Ransom arrived in Taylorsville in August 1905 to earn money, not to make a career. The Vanderbilt student needed about eight hundred dollars to finish college, and his father, a Methodist minister, approved the plan. He taught the sixth and seventh grades in the town's two-story school, built in 1902, for forty dollars a month, rising to sixty-five when he asked for more, and he joined the Methodist church. Local accounts remember a strict, demanding teacher. Asked in March 1906 to stay another year, he declined and took a Latin and Greek post in Lewisburg, Tennessee.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lauren Rogers Museum of Art — 20 mi
  Mississippi's oldest art museum, a 1923 memorial to a timber heir in Laurel, with a major Native American basket collection and no admission fee since it opened.
• Amos Deason House — 21 mi
  A Greek Revival house in Ellisville where a Confederate major was shot in 1863, tied to the history of the Free State of Jones.
• Prentiss Institute — 30 mi
  A school for Black Mississippians founded in 1907 in a former plantation house, with a restored 1926 Rosenwald building that now holds a museum.

More markers nearby

• Carver Central High School — 15 mi
• Courthouse Square at Williamsburg — 18 mi
• Beacon Homes — 20 mi
• Laurel City Hall — 20 mi