Prairie

Sooy Smith's raid was already late when it reached here. Ordered to leave Memphis on February 1, 1864, to meet Sherman at Meridian, he waited about ten days and started on February 11. On February 20 he fought Forrest's men at Prairie Station and Aberdeen, and on the 21st Colonel Jeffrey Forrest drew him into the swampy ground by the Tombigbee, where he turned back. The next dawn Nathan Bedford Forrest hit his retreating rearguard at Okolona, and Jeffrey Forrest was killed. Sources disagree on casualties, from about 100 Union and 50 Confederate to 388 and 144.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Howlin' Wolf Memorial and Blues Trail Marker — 13 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 — 18 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 — 25 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.
• Chickasaw Council House — 25 mi
  A roadside exhibit on the Natchez Trace Parkway marking the Chickasaw capital of the 1820s and the council house where the 1832 treaty of Pontotoc Creek ended Chickasaw title to Mississippi.

More markers nearby

• Gulf Ordnance Plant — 0.3 mi
• The Lenoir Plantation — 3.2 mi
• Sandy Clay Rosenwald School — 3.8 mi
• Reuben Davis — 6.6 mi