Mississippi Central R.R. Campaign

Colonel Robert Murphy, who commanded the Union garrison, ignored Grant's warnings of enemy movement, and his five hundred men were still in camp as dawn came on December 20, 1862. Van Dorn's cavalry attacked in three columns: one at the infantry camp, one at the cavalry camp, where soldiers stood in line for morning inspection, and one through the town to the square. The fight was over by eight o'clock. More than a thousand Union soldiers were captured, and Van Dorn put the supplies taken at $1.5 million. He burned the rest, and Grant fell back to Tennessee.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Ida B. Wells-Barnett Museum — 0.4 mi
  The house in Holly Springs where Ida B. Wells was born into slavery in 1862, now a museum of African American history, art and culture.
• Rust College — 0.6 mi
  The first historically Black college founded in Mississippi, started in 1866 in a Holly Springs church by a formerly enslaved minister and a white Methodist clergyman.
• Sardis Lake and Dam — 32 mi
  A flood-control lake on the Little Tallahatchie, built from 1930s labor and a dredge named Pontotoc, with a dam that for years was the largest earth-filled dam in the world.

More markers nearby

• Holly Springs — steps away
• Yellow Fever House — steps away
• R. L. Burnside — steps away
• Junior Kimbrough — steps away