Mary Holmes College

The school opened in Jackson in 1892 as Mary Holmes Seminary, teaching young Black women home economics and Bible, and burned in January 1895. The Presbyterian board rebuilt in West Point, a railroad town with a large Black community, and classes began there on January 1, 1897. Men were admitted in 1932, when it turned to training teachers, and it became a junior college in 1959. In the 1960s it hosted a pilot catfish farming project and trained Head Start volunteers. It lost accreditation in December 2002, and the Presbyterian Church (USA) announced the closing on March 3, 2005.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Howlin' Wolf Memorial and Blues Trail Marker — 1.3 mi
  A Mississippi Blues Trail marker and granite memorial on East Broad Street honoring Chester Burnett, who was born nearby in 1910 and became the Chicago blues giant Howlin' Wolf.
• Waverley Mansion — 9.8 mi
  A National Historic Landmark mansion above the Tombigbee River, home of a plantation family that enslaved more than a hundred people, left empty for half a century before a family restored it.
• Tennessee Williams Welcome Center — 16 mi
  The 1875 Episcopal rectory where Tennessee Williams was born in 1911, moved to Main Street in the 1990s and now Columbus's welcome center and a National Literary Landmark.
• Sam D. Hamilton Noxubee National Wildlife Refuge — 24 mi
  A 48,000-acre refuge of bottomland forest and lakes in Noxubee, Oktibbeha and Winston counties, rebuilt from worn-out farmland, with red-cockaded woodpeckers, alligators and winter eagles.

More markers nearby

• Payne Field Site — 3.4 mi
• Palo Alto — 9.0 mi
• Sandy Clay Rosenwald School — 9.7 mi
• The Lenoir Plantation — 10 mi