Rodney Presbyterian Church

The brick church was raised from 1829 to 1832 on land given by David Hunt, a planter who by 1860 enslaved more than 500 people. The Rev. Jeremiah Chamberlain, Oakland College's first president, began the building. On Sunday, September 13, 1863, the pastor invited sailors from the Union gunboat Rattler to worship. Confederates burst in to arrest them, and the Rattler's crew answered with a cannon shot that struck the front wall; the damage is still visible. A bullet lodged in a window frame just after a young worshiper, Eliza Ogden, was pushed out through it.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Alcorn State University and Oakland Memorial Chapel — 3.6 mi
  The 1871 Reconstruction college on the old Oakland College campus, first led by Hiram Revels, with the 1838 chapel built by Black craftsmen.
• Lake Bruin State Park — 6.6 mi
  A state park on a Mississippi River oxbow near St. Joseph, named for a territorial judge who owned a plantation beside it, on a former fish hatchery site.
• Windsor Ruins — 6.8 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.
• Mount Locust — 12 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.

More markers nearby

• St. Joseph — 4.3 mi
• Mound Plantation — 7.3 mi
• Springfield — 7.7 mi
• Old Greenville — 8.8 mi