Madison

Madison grew up in the shadow of an older town. Madisonville, on the Natchez Trace stagecoach route, was Madison County's first seat in 1828, and its residents drifted toward the railroad community until the old town died out. Union forces largely destroyed Madison Station in 1863. In 1897 the Madison Land Company promoted the area to northerners with the slogan Go South, and grow up with the country, offering land for as little as $3 an acre. The population was 703 in 1960 and passed 27,000 in 2020.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Natchez Trace Parkway at Ridgeland — 2.7 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 — 4.8 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.
• Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument — 10 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.
• Mississippi Civil Rights Museum — 12 mi
  A state museum in downtown Jackson, opened in 2017 beside the Museum of Mississippi History, that tells the movement from 1945 to 1970 through the people who made it.

More markers nearby

• Montgomery House — 0.3 mi
• Rosa Scott School — 0.3 mi
• John Curran House — 0.4 mi
• Farr Mercantile Company — 0.4 mi