Myrtle

Myrtle began as a settlement called Candy Hill, established about two miles south of the town's present location in 1857. When the community applied for a post office after the Civil War, it took the name Myrtle, after the abundance of myrtle trees growing in the area. The Kansas City, Memphis and Birmingham Railroad was built through in the 1880s, and the town shifted northward to its present location. The move placed Myrtle on the railroad line that also gave rise to the nearby town of Blue Springs.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Brices Cross Roads National Battlefield Site — 22 mi
  The crossroads where Nathan Bedford Forrest routed a larger Union force in June 1864, and where Black regiments, many raised at Corinth, held the bridge that let most of the army escape.
• Ida B. Wells-Barnett Museum — 24 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 — 24 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.
• Oxford Square — 27 mi
  The courthouse square laid out in 1837 on land bought from a Chickasaw woman, rebuilt after the 1864 burning and home to Square Books and a memorial to Lafayette County's lynching victims.

More markers nearby

• Mosley and Johnson — 7.6 mi
• Union County, Mississippi — 7.7 mi
• William Faulkner — 7.7 mi
• Roma Wilson & Leon Pinson — 8.2 mi