Old Greenville

Jefferson County's seat from 1802 to 1825, Greenville was once the largest town on the Natchez Trace. In 1803 two men from the outlaw Samuel Mason's gang, Peter Alston and Wiley Harpe, tried to collect the reward by bringing in Mason's head; they were recognized and hanged here, at a spot long called the gallows field. Andrew Jackson's troops camped here after New Orleans. When the legislature moved the seat to Fayette in 1825, the town emptied, and by 1835 it was nearly abandoned. The last building, a hotel, burned about 1890. Only the cemetery remains.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Mount Locust — 5.1 mi
  A 1780s Natchez Trace inn and cotton farm at milepost 15.5, with an enslaved people's cemetery of 43 graves and a brick kiln behind the house.
• Alcorn State University and Oakland Memorial Chapel — 8.9 mi
  The 1871 Reconstruction college on the old Oakland College campus, first led by Hiram Revels, with the 1838 chapel built by Black craftsmen.
• Emerald Mound — 9.9 mi
  The second-largest Mississippian ceremonial mound in the country, beside the Natchez Trace Parkway, built by ancestors of the Natchez and kept from climbing at the request of tribes.
• Windsor Ruins — 13 mi
  Twenty-three standing Corinthian columns left by an 1890 fire, the largest antebellum mansion in Mississippi, built with enslaved labor on a 2,600-acre cotton plantation.

More markers nearby

• Springfield — 2.9 mi
• Charles Evers — 5.2 mi
• Thomas Hinds — 5.3 mi
• Church Hill — 6.1 mi