Starkville

The charter is the polite part of the record. In 1830 the Choctaw living in what became Oktibbeha County gave up their claims in the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek. Later a mob lynched a Black man in 1865, hanged two more taken from the local jail in 1879, and hanged Eli Bryant in 1888; in 1915 about 5,000 people watched the public execution of two Black men. The Klan held a large rally in 1922. A 1970 merger of the Black and white schools met boycotts, firebombings and gunfire. About 35 percent of residents are Black now.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sam D. Hamilton Noxubee National Wildlife Refuge — 13 mi
  A 48,000-acre refuge of bottomland forest and lakes in Noxubee, Oktibbeha and Winston counties, rebuilt from worn-out farmland, with red-cockaded woodpeckers, alligators and winter eagles.
• Howlin' Wolf Memorial and Blues Trail Marker — 14 mi
  A Mississippi Blues Trail marker and granite memorial on East Broad Street honoring Chester Burnett, who was born nearby in 1910 and became the Chicago blues giant Howlin' Wolf.
• Waverley Mansion — 19 mi
  A National Historic Landmark mansion above the Tombigbee River, home of a plantation family that enslaved more than a hundred people, left empty for half a century before a family restored it.
• Tennessee Williams Welcome Center — 22 mi
  The 1875 Episcopal rectory where Tennessee Williams was born in 1911, moved to Main Street in the 1990s and now Columbus's welcome center and a National Literary Landmark.

More markers nearby

• First Presbyterian Church — steps away
• Johnny Cash "Starkville City Jail" — steps away
• Oktibbeha County Blues — 0.5 mi
• Grierson's Raid — 0.8 mi