Town Square

The town takes its name from Gerard C. Brandon, the first native Mississippian elected governor, who held the office longer than any governor before the Civil War. His years in office saw the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, signed by the Choctaw in 1830, and the Treaty of Pontotoc Creek with the Chickasaw in 1832. Under the federal policy of Indian Removal, treaties like these exchanged Choctaw and Chickasaw land for acreage west of the Mississippi River and opened several million acres of cotton land to white settlement. Brandon spent his last years on his plantation in Adams County.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• 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.
• Old Capitol Museum — 11 mi
  Mississippi's Greek Revival statehouse of 1839, where the legislature voted to secede, Hiram Revels was elected to the U.S. Senate and the 1890 constitution was written, now a free state museum.
• Farish Street Historic District — 12 mi
  Jackson's Black business and cultural center, where Medgar Evers kept the NAACP office and furniture-store owners recorded the blues, now a quiet National Register district.
• Natchez Trace Parkway at Ridgeland — 13 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.

More markers nearby

• Rankin County Courthouses — steps away
• Seminary Square — 0.3 mi
• Old Brandon Cemetery — 0.3 mi
• Drakes United Methodist Church — 7.3 mi