Seminary Square

The building at the heart of this square was Johnson Hall, a brick Greek Revival hall of about 1837 with a columned, pedimented portico, home of the Brandon Female Academy. Daguerreotypes made on June 6, 1855, show students lined up around it and in a classroom, a class portrait likely among the earliest for any Mississippi school. After the Methodist church was burned in 1863, the congregation met in the hall until 1873, and Episcopalians and Baptists also worshipped there. The school ran until 1896, and the hall was demolished in 1923 for Brandon High School.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Mississippi Civil Rights Museum — 11 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.
• Old Capitol Museum — 11 mi
  Mississippi's Greek Revival statehouse of 1839, where the legislature voted to secede, Hiram Revels was elected to the U.S. Senate and the 1890 constitution was written, now a free state museum.
• Farish Street Historic District — 12 mi
  Jackson's Black business and cultural center, where Medgar Evers kept the NAACP office and furniture-store owners recorded the blues, now a quiet National Register district.
• Natchez Trace Parkway at Ridgeland — 13 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.

More markers nearby

• Town Square — 0.3 mi
• Rankin County Courthouses — 0.3 mi
• Old Brandon Cemetery — 0.4 mi
• Drakes United Methodist Church — 7.3 mi