William Clark Falkner

William Clark Falkner settled in Ripley and fought in the Mexican War. In 1849 he stabbed Robert Hindman to death in a feud that had begun over rumors, and was acquitted. He raised the Magnolia Rifles, became colonel of the 2nd Mississippi and lost a later vote for command. After the war he built the first narrow-gauge railroad in North Mississippi, and he fathered at least one child by an enslaved woman. His novel The White Rose of Memphis stayed in print until mid-century. On November 5, 1889, his former partner Richard Thurmond shot him on the Ripley square.

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

• Tippah County — steps away
• Blue Mountain College — 6.0 mi
• Benton County Courthouse — 15 mi
• Willie Mitchell — 15 mi