Theora Hamblett

Hamblett grew up near Paris on a farm of several hundred acres worked with tenant families, in a dogtrot house her father had built before the Civil War. A gift of crayons at about eight and a first trip to a traveling circus set her drawing. She graduated from Lafayette County Agricultural High School in 1915 and taught in one- and two-teacher schools for nearly two decades. Her paintings fall into landscapes, children's games, memory scenes and visions, the last beginning at seventeen, which she took as a sign that God wanted them painted.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Casey Jones Railroad Museum — 9.3 mi
  The old Illinois Central depot in Water Valley, where Casey Jones worked in the 1890s, with a Mississippi Blues Trail marker for the songs written about his death in 1900.
• Rowan Oak — 13 mi
  William Faulkner's Greek Revival house in Oxford, bought in 1930 and kept by the University of Mississippi, with the outline of A Fable still written on his study wall.
• Oxford Square — 13 mi
  The courthouse square laid out in 1837 on land bought from a Chickasaw woman, rebuilt after the 1864 burning and home to Square Books and a memorial to Lafayette County's lynching victims.
• The Lyceum and the Circle, University of Mississippi — 13 mi
  The 1848 Greek Revival building at the center of the Ole Miss campus, where federal marshals held off a mob on 30 September 1962 and James Meredith registered the next morning.

More markers nearby

• James Ford — 9.3 mi
• Casey Jones — 9.3 mi
• Hubert Creekmore — 9.4 mi
• Buckner's Trestle — 12 mi