Tippah County

Tippah was a county of small farms more than plantations. In 1860 it ranked tenth in the state in livestock and sixth in sweet potatoes but only twenty-third in cotton, and it counted twenty lumber mills, twenty-one flour mills and seventy-two churches. The 1840 census listed 7,310 free people and 2,134 enslaved people. Later the creation of Benton and Union Counties drew off much of the population, which stood at 12,867 in 1880. Residents grew by far the most tobacco in the state. The name is said to come from a Chickasaw word meaning cut off.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Brices Cross Roads National Battlefield Site — 20 mi
  The crossroads where Nathan Bedford Forrest routed a larger Union force in June 1864, and where Black regiments, many raised at Corinth, held the bridge that let most of the army escape.
• Big Hill Pond State Park — 25 mi
  A 4,000-acre bottomland park in McNairy County built around a pond that railroad crews dug in 1853, with a 70-foot tower over Dismal Swamp and Civil War earthworks.
• Corinth Civil War Interpretive Center — 28 mi
  A Park Service center at Battery Robinett telling why two railroads made Corinth a prize, from the siege of 1862 to the battle of October, and what happened to the people who sought freedom there.
• Corinth Contraband Camp — 29 mi
  The site of a Union-run town of freedom seekers in 1862 and 1863, with a quarter-mile walkway of life-size bronze figures and the origin of a Black regiment that fought at Brices Cross Roads.

More markers nearby

• William Clark Falkner — steps away
• Blue Mountain College — 6.0 mi
• Benton County Courthouse — 15 mi
• Willie Mitchell — 15 mi