John Ford, a South Carolina Methodist, settled with his brothers on the west bank of the Pearl River between 1809 and 1811, and the house he built soon afterward is the oldest frontier-style structure in the valley. It stands on a plateau a mile and a half west of the river, less than a mile north of the Louisiana line. Ford's brother Joseph ran a ferry two and a half miles away, and the post road from Fort Stoddard to New Orleans reached the house, which got one of the territory's first post offices in December 1812. Andrew Jackson stayed overnight on November 27, 1814, on his way to the Battle of New Orleans. In August 1813, with the War of 1812 and the Creek War bringing fears of attack, Ford wrote the territorial governor that a stockade had gone up around it.
On October 29, 1816, seventeen delegates from fifteen counties met here as the Pearl River Convention, with Ford as secretary, to ask Congress to admit the Mississippi Territory as one state. Congress split the territory instead, and Mississippi became a state in 1817. Ford also served at the constitutional convention that summer. Methodists call the house the Cradle of Mississippi Methodism: the conference met here in 1814 and again in 1818, and Bishop William McKendree ordained Ford in the house.
Ford held forty-four people in slavery in 1815. The Marion County Historical Society bought the house and about six acres in 1962 and has kept it open since June 1963. It is on the National Register and is a Mississippi Landmark.
The closest stops worth working into your route
Roadside plaques and monuments within a short detour