Site of the Hermitage

Benjamin Humphreys was born at the Hermitage in 1808, was expelled from West Point with about forty other cadets after a Christmas frolic, and served Claiborne County in both houses of the legislature as a Whig. He opposed secession but organized the Sunflower Guards and later commanded William Barksdale's old brigade. Elected governor in October 1865, he criticized lawmakers who wanted to return Black Mississippians to peonage under the Black Codes. In 1868 a military governor, whose orders he had countermanded, removed him. Humphreys County bears his name.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Windsor Ruins — 11 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.
• Alcorn State University and Oakland Memorial Chapel — 14 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 — 15 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.
• Vicksburg National Military Park — 24 mi
  A 16-mile tour road through the trenches of the 47-day siege of 1863, with a national cemetery and the story of the thousands of enslaved people who reached freedom behind Union lines.

More markers nearby

• First Baptist M.B. Church — 3.8 mi
• Claiborne County — 3.8 mi
• Port Gibson — 4.0 mi
• The Bernheimer Complex — 4.0 mi