St. Francis Mission School

The campus is as much a story of earth moved as of lessons taught. The School Sisters of St. Francis built on a bluff that was cut down by 60 feet before construction began. Jackson architect James T. Canizaro designed the spare Romanesque church and probably the convent and school, all built between 1939 and 1942. Enrollment grew from about 80 pupils to more than 300 in the 1950s. Mike Espy, elected to Congress in 1986 as the first Black Mississippian there since Reconstruction, is a notable alumnus. The site now houses a Head Start center.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Triangle Cultural Center — 0.5 mi
  A 1904 school on Main Street in Yazoo City that survived the great fire of that May and now holds the county's historical museum, in a town rebuilt in brick on the same lots.
• Blue Front Cafe — 14 mi
  A cinder-block juke joint in Bentonia, opened in 1948 by Carey and Mary Holmes, home of the Bentonia school of blues and a stop on the Mississippi Blues Trail.
• Delta National Forest — 23 mi
  The only bottomland hardwood forest in the national forest system, some 60,000 acres of oak, ash and cypress in Sharkey County, run with the state as Sunflower Wildlife Management Area.

More markers nearby

• Redoubt McKee — steps away
• Yazoo County Courthouse — 0.4 mi
• Bethel A.M.E. Church — 0.4 mi
• B.S. Ricks Memorial Library — 0.5 mi