Temporary State Capital

Columbia was a small river town when the legislature arrived. Several Lott men had settled on the Pearl River in 1813, and the town was incorporated on June 25, 1819, the fourth municipality in Mississippi, named for Columbia, South Carolina, where many early settlers had come from. For its first hundred years it relied on the river to move goods, when the Pearl was deeper and wider, and it has always been at risk of flooding. Marion County itself was cut from Amite County in 1811.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• John Ford Home — 16 mi
  A frontier house on the Pearl River where the 1816 Pearl River Convention met, kept by the Marion County Historical Society and open to the public since 1963.
• Salmon Site (Tatum Salt Dome) — 17 mi
  The only place east of the Mississippi River where the United States detonated nuclear devices, two underground tests in 1964 and 1966 in Lamar County.
• Prentiss Institute — 24 mi
  A school for Black Mississippians founded in 1907 in a former plantation house, with a restored 1926 Rosenwald building that now holds a museum.

More markers nearby

• Hanging of Will Purvis — steps away
• Birthplace of Mississippi Rodeo — 0.9 mi
• Gov. Hugh L. White Mansion — 1.2 mi
• Conerly's P. O. and Lampton's Store — 20 mi