Sherwood Bonner (McDowell)

When Union troops occupied Holly Springs, General Grant and his officers commandeered homes, including Cedarhurst, where the Bonner family lived. Kate Bonner was thirteen in 1862. Her mother died in 1865. The family's Black nurse, Molly Wilson, whom several generations called Grandmammy, later supplied the voice for five Grandmammy Tales that helped launch a popular genre of Black-dialect fiction. Bonner also wrote of the 1878 yellow fever epidemic, which killed her father and brother, and set her Reconstruction novel Like unto Like in Yariba, a blend of Holly Springs and Huntsville.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Ida B. Wells-Barnett Museum — 0.5 mi
  The house in Holly Springs where Ida B. Wells was born into slavery in 1862, now a museum of African American history, art and culture.
• Rust College — 0.7 mi
  The first historically Black college founded in Mississippi, started in 1866 in a Holly Springs church by a formerly enslaved minister and a white Methodist clergyman.

More markers nearby

• Mississippi Central R.R. Campaign — steps away
• Airliewood — steps away
• Walthall Home — 0.5 mi
• R. L. Burnside — 0.7 mi