Private John Allen

John Mills Allen won his House seat by appealing to the privates who had served under a former general, and he was Private John to the end. On February 20, 1901, near the close of eight terms, he delivered the Fish Hatchery Speech, called the most spontaneous burst of wit ever heard on the floor of Congress. He had argued for a national fish hatchery in Tupelo; Congress approved it soon after and President McKinley signed the bill. The hatchery was renamed for him in 1982.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Brices Cross Roads National Battlefield Site — 5.6 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.
• Natchez Trace Parkway Visitor Center — 14 mi
  The parkway's headquarters and official visitor center near Tupelo, with a film, a small museum of the Old Trace and the surviving New Deal houses of the Tupelo Homesteads.
• Chickasaw Village Site — 18 mi
  A Chickasaw village on a remnant of the Black Belt Prairie beside the Natchez Trace Parkway, with house outlines marked on the ground and signs that speak in Chickasaw voices.
• Elvis Presley Birthplace — 18 mi
  The two-room house in East Tupelo where Elvis Presley was born in 1935, with a museum and the church building the family attended, set near the vanished Black neighborhoods where he first heard the blues.

More markers nearby

• George Wardlaw — 0.9 mi
• James Harrison "Babe" McCarthy — 1.0 mi
• Elijah Pierce — 1.0 mi
• Battle of Booneville — 9.2 mi