The hills of Benton, Marshall, Lafayette, Tippah, Union and Yalobusha counties were Chickasaw and Choctaw country until the treaties of 1830 and 1832. Chewalla Lake takes its name from a Choctaw word for a supreme being, and Native people built a ceremonial mound in the area.
By the 1930s nearly all this land had been farmed since before the Civil War, and much of it was abandoned and badly eroded. The Holly Springs Purchase Unit was approved on 30 August 1933 at the urging of Congressman Wall Doxey, though the Forest Service's own chief doubted that such worn-out ground had national forest character. Parcels were small, rarely over 100 acres. A Civilian Conservation Corps camp at Potts Camp ran from 1933 to 1943, and crews planted pine across the eroded fields. The forest was established in 1936.
Today the Holly Springs Ranger District manages about 155,000 acres of public land scattered among roughly 530,000 acres of private ownership, so the forest comes in pieces rather than one block. Lake Tillatoba, in the southern unit, is a quiet place for fishing and picnicking. Check with the ranger district in Oxford for current road and lake conditions before driving in.
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