Madison County Courthouse

Canton's courthouse has been saved by its neighbors more than once. Women of the town twice stopped plans to remove the dome, in 1856 and again in 1925, arguing that beauty should prevail over reason. The county paid $26,428 for the building, and its bricks came from an older courthouse condemned in 1840 because the mortar had failed. The building welcomed the railroad, sent soldiers to war, and served as an early library, a theater and a hospital during a yellow fever epidemic. A new courthouse opened a block north in the 1990s.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Natchez Trace Parkway at Ridgeland — 14 mi
  The stretch of the Natchez Trace around Ridgeland, where a worn section of the Old Trace, the Ross Barnett Reservoir and the Choctaw town of Chisha Foka share a few miles of parkway.
• Tougaloo College — 16 mi
  A historically Black college north of Jackson, founded on a former plantation in 1869, whose students staged Mississippi's first sit-in and whose chapel hosted the movement's leaders.
• Blue Front Cafe — 19 mi
  A cinder-block juke joint in Bentonia, opened in 1948 by Carey and Mary Holmes, home of the Bentonia school of blues and a stop on the Mississippi Blues Trail.
• Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument — 22 mi
  A modest ranch house in Jackson's Elraine neighborhood where Medgar Evers was shot in the driveway in 1963, now a unit of the National Park Service.

More markers nearby

• Grace Church — steps away
• Hickory Street — steps away
• Achilles "Killis" Walton House — 0.3 mi
• March Against Fear — 0.6 mi