Yazoo City stands where the Yazoo River bends against the bluffs, a spot the Choctaw leader Greenwood LeFlore is said to have received as a square-mile grant in the 1820s. Its lots were sold in 1830 and the town took its present name in 1841. Yazoo County was a cotton powerhouse built on enslaved labor: in 1860 it held 16,716 enslaved people, about three-quarters of its population. After the war the White Leagues used violence against Republican officials, and Albert Morgan, who fled Mississippi, wrote Yazoo; or, On the Picket Line of Freedom in the South.
On a windy May 25, 1904, a fire set by a boy playing with matches swept the business district, more than 100 homes and all but one of the town's churches. No one died. The courthouse, the new library and an unfinished school beside it were spared. The Triangle Cultural Center at 332 North Main Street is the Main Street School, completed in 1904. The town rebuilt on the same sites, and the brick stores of 1905 and 1906 along Main Street are on the National Register.
The center houses the Sam Olden Yazoo Historical Society Museum, a collection of antique tools and a theater. The state archives rank the building among the best turn-of-the-century schools in Mississippi. Willie Morris, who grew up in Yazoo City, wrote about it in North Toward Home. In town, Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, built in the 1800s, is described locally as the first brick church built by African Americans in Mississippi.
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