Oxford Square

Oxford began in 1837 when John Martin, John Chisom and John Craig bought land from Hoka, a Chickasaw woman, five years after the Treaty of Pontotoc Creek opened the country to settlement. They named the town for Oxford, England, to sell it as a seat of learning, and in 1841 the legislature agreed by putting the state university here.

The square has been rebuilt before. Union troops occupied the town in 1862 under Grant and Sherman, and in 1864 Major General A. J. Smith burned the buildings around the square, the courthouse among them. A new Lafayette County Courthouse was finished in 1872. On its east side, a marker placed in September 2021 with the Equal Justice Initiative names the county's known lynching victims: Harris Tunstal in 1885, William McGregory in 1890, William Steen in 1893, William Chandler in 1895, Lawson Patton in 1908 and Elwood Higginbottom in 1935, along with a man killed in 1891 whose name was not recorded.

The stores around the square include Square Books, an independent bookstore founded in 1979. Lafayette County is generally taken as the model for Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, and Oxford for its seat, Jefferson, though he moved and renamed places freely. Rowan Oak is less than a mile away.