Strawberry Patch House

Strawberries gave this farmhouse its name. In the last half of the nineteenth century it was surrounded by 100 acres of strawberry fields, and its owner, Dr. H. E. McKay, was called the Strawberry King in the 1870s because he and his brother were the first in the area to ship their fruit north by rail. Illinois Central trains had begun carrying strawberries from southern Illinois to Chicago in 1866 or 1867, and growers farther south followed as shipping improved. Mississippi's strawberry boom peaked in the 1870s and 1880s. A round springhouse stood behind the house.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Natchez Trace Parkway at Ridgeland — 1.9 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.
• Tougaloo College — 4.4 mi
  A historically Black college north of Jackson, founded on a former plantation in 1869, whose students staged Mississippi's first sit-in and whose chapel hosted the movement's leaders.
• Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument — 9.7 mi
  A modest ranch house in Jackson's Elraine neighborhood where Medgar Evers was shot in the driveway in 1963, now a unit of the National Park Service.
• 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.

More markers nearby

• World War II Airfield Hangars — 0.4 mi
• Dorroh Street Historic District — 0.8 mi
• Old School Gymnasium — 1.0 mi
• Farr Mercantile Company — 1.1 mi