Ridgeland

The Highland Colony sold a farm life to northern buyers. Treakle and Nichols, Chicago real estate men, advertised for settlers from the North, and pears and strawberries became the leading cash crops. The business district grew along Jackson Street because the railroad ran there, and a two-room school opened in 1910, the year the census counted 158 people. Ridgeland's schools merged with Madison's by 1925. Then the suburbs arrived: 1,650 residents in 1970, 5,461 in 1980 and 11,714 in 1990, with Northpark Mall opening in 1984.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Natchez Trace Parkway at Ridgeland — 0.4 mi
  The stretch of the Natchez Trace around Ridgeland, where a worn section of the Old Trace, the Ross Barnett Reservoir and the Choctaw town of Chisha Foka share a few miles of parkway.
• Tougaloo College — 2.4 mi
  A historically Black college north of Jackson, founded on a former plantation in 1869, whose students staged Mississippi's first sit-in and whose chapel hosted the movement's leaders.
• Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument — 7.7 mi
  A modest ranch house in Jackson's Elraine neighborhood where Medgar Evers was shot in the driveway in 1963, now a unit of the National Park Service.
• Mississippi Civil Rights Museum — 9.2 mi
  A state museum in downtown Jackson, opened in 2017 beside the Museum of Mississippi History, that tells the movement from 1945 to 1970 through the people who made it.

More markers nearby

• Cornerstone Plaza — 1.2 mi
• World War II Airfield Hangars — 1.8 mi
• Strawberry Patch House — 2.0 mi
• Dorroh Street Historic District — 2.3 mi