Tupelo, Mississippi
Tupelo is a city in, the county seat of, Lee County, United States. With an estimated population of 38,114 in 2017, Tupelo is the seventh-largest city in Mississippi and is considered a commercial and cultural hub of North Mississippi. Tupelo was incorporated in 1867, although the area had earlier been settled as "Gum Pond" along the Mobile and Ohio Railroad. On February 7, 1934, Tupelo became the first city to receive power from the Tennessee Valley Authority thus giving it the nickname "The First TVA City." Much of the city was devastated by a major tornado in 1936 that still ranks as one of the deadliest tornadoes in American history. Following electrification, Tupelo boomed as a regional manufacturing and distribution center and was once considered a hub of the American furniture manufacturing industry. Although many of Tupelo's manufacturing industries have declined since the 1990s, the city has continued to grow due to strong healthcare and financial service industries. Tupelo is the smallest city in the United States, the headquarters of more than one bank with over $10 billion in assets.
Tupelo has a deep connection to Mississippi's music history, being associated with artists as diverse as Elvis Presley, Rae Sremmurd, Diplo. The city is home to multiple art and cultural institutions, including the Elvis Presley Birthplace and the 10,000-seat BancorpSouth Arena, the largest multipurpose indoor arena in Mississippi. Tupelo is the only city in the Southern United States to be named an All-America City five times, most in 2015; the Tupelo micropolitian area contains Lee and Pontotoc counties and had a population of 140,081 in 2017. Indigenous peoples lived in the area for thousands of years; the historic Chickasaw and Choctaw, both Muskogean-speaking peoples of the Southeast, occupied this area long before European encounter. French and British colonists traded with these indigenous peoples and tried to make alliances with them; the French established towns in Mississippi on the Gulf Coast. At times, the European powers came into armed conflict. On May 26, 1736, the Battle of Ackia was fought near the site of present-day Tupelo.
The French, under Louisiana governor Jean Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, had sought to link Louisiana with Acadia and the other northern colonies of New France. In the early 19th century, after years of trading and encroachment by European-American settlers from the United States, conflicts increased as the US settlers tried to gain land from these nations. In 1830, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act and authorized the relocation of all the Southeast Native Americans west of the Mississippi River, completed by the end of the 1830s. In the early years of settlement, European-Americans named this town Gum Pond due to its numerous tupelo trees, known locally as blackgum; the city still hosts the annual Gumtree Arts Festival. During the Civil War and Confederate forces fought in the area in 1864 in the Battle of Tupelo. Designated the Tupelo National Battlefield, the battlefield is administered by the National Park Service. In addition, the Brices Cross Roads National Battlefield, about ten miles north, commemorates another American Civil War battle.
After the war, a cross-state railroad for northern Mississippi was constructed through the town, which encouraged industry and growth. With expansion, the town changed its name in honor of the battle, it was incorporated in 1870. By the early twentieth century, the town had become a site of cotton textile mills, which provided new jobs for residents of the rural area. Under the state's segregation practices, the mills employed only white children. Reformers attempted to protect them through labor laws; the last known bank robbery by Machine Gun Kelly, a Prohibition-era gangster, took place on November 30, 1932 at the Citizen's State Bank in Tupelo. After the robbery, the bank's chief teller said of Kelly, "He was the kind of guy that, if you looked at him, you would never thought he was a bank robber."During the Great Depression, Tupelo was electrified by the new Tennessee Valley Authority, which had constructed dams and power plants throughout the region to generate hydroelectric power for the large, rural area.
The distribution infrastructure was built with federal assistance as well, employing many local workers. In 1935, President Franklin Roosevelt visited this "First TVA City". In 2007, the nearby village of Blue Springs was selected as the site for Toyota's eleventh automobile manufacturing plant in the United States. In 2013 Gale Stauffer of the Tupelo Police Department died in a shootout following a bank robbery the first officer killed in the line of duty in the Department's history; the spring of 1936 brought Tupelo one of its worst-ever natural disasters, part of the Tupelo-Gainesville tornado outbreak of April 5–6 in that year. The storm leveled 48 city blocks and over 200 homes, killing 216 people and injuring more than 700 persons, it struck at night. Among the survivors was Elvis Presley a baby. Obliterating the Gum Pond neighborhood, the tornado dropped most of the victims' bodies in the pond; the storm has since been rated F5 on the modern Fujita scale. The Tupelo Tornado is recognized as one of the deadliest in U.
S. history. The Mississippi State Geologist estimated a final death toll of 233 persons, but 100 whites were still reported as hospitalized at the time; because the white newspapers did not publish news about blacks until the 1940s and 1950s, historians have had difficulty learning the fates of blacks i
Columbus, Mississippi
Columbus is a city in and the county seat of Lowndes County, on the eastern border of Mississippi, United States, located east, but north and northeast of the Tombigbee River, referred to as the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway. It is 146 miles northeast of Jackson, 92 miles north of Meridian, 63 miles south of Tupelo, 60 miles northwest of Tuscaloosa, 120 miles west of Birmingham, Alabama; the population was 25,944 at the 2000 census and 23,640 in 2010. The population in 2012 was estimated to be 23,452. Columbus is the principal city of the Columbus Micropolitan Statistical Area, part of the larger Columbus-West Point Combined Statistical Area. Columbus is part of the area of Mississippi called The Golden Triangle, consisting of Columbus, West Point and Starkville, in the counties of Lowndes and Oktibbeha; the first record of the site of Columbus in Western history is found in the annals of the explorer Hernando de Soto, reputed to have crossed the nearby Tombigbee River on his search for El Dorado.
However, the site does not enter the main continuity of United States history until December 1810, when John Pitchlynn, the U. S. Indian agent and interpreter for the Choctaw Nation, moved to Plymouth Bluff, where he built a home, established a farm, transacted Choctaw Agency business. After the Battle of New Orleans, Andrew Jackson recognized the urgent need for roads to connect New Orleans to the rest of the country. In 1817 Jackson ordered a road be built to provide a direct route from Nashville to New Orleans, his surveyor, Captain Hugh Young, chose a place on the Tombigbee River where high ground approached the river on both sides as the location for a ferry to be used for crossing the river when high water prevented fording the river. A military bridge was constructed where the present-day Tombigbee Bridge was developed in Columbus, Mississippi. Jacksons' Military Road opened the way for development in the area. Columbus was founded in 1819 and as it was believed to be in Alabama it was first recognized by an Alabama Legislative act as the Town of Columbus on December 6, 1819.
Before its incorporation, the town site was referred to informally as Possum Town, a name, given by the local Native Americans, who were Choctaw and Chickasaw. The name Possum Town remains the town's nickname among locals; the town was settled where Jackson's Military Road crossed the Tombigbee River 4 miles south of John Pitchlynn's residence at Plymouth Bluff. In 1820 the post office, at Pitchlynn's relocated in Columbus. Pitchlynn's, settled in 1810 became the town of Plymouth in 1836 and is now the location of an environmental center for Mississippi University for Women. Silas McBee suggested the name Columbus; the city's founders soon established a school known as Franklin Academy. It is known as Mississippi's first public school; the territorial boundary of Mississippi and Alabama had to be corrected as, a year earlier, Franklin Academy was indicated as being in Alabama. In fact, during its early post-Mississippi-founding history, the city of Columbus was still referred to as Columbus, Alabama.
During the American Civil War, Columbus was a hospital town. Its arsenal manufactured handguns and a few cannons; because of this, the Union ordered the invasion of Columbus, but was stopped by Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest. This is substantiated in the book The Battle of West Point: Confederate Triumph at Ellis Bridge by John McBride. Many of the casualties from the Battle of Shiloh were brought to Columbus. Thousands were buried in the town's Friendship Cemetery. One of the hospitals was located at Annunciation Catholic Church, built in 1863 and still operating in the 21st century; the decision of a group of ladies to decorate the Union and Confederate graves with flowers together on April 25, 1866, is an early example of what became known as Memorial Day. A poet, Francis Miles Finch, read about it in the New York newspapers and commemorated the occasion with the poem "The Blue and the Grey". Bellware and Gardiner noted this observance of the holiday in The Genesis of the Memorial Day Holiday in America.
They recognized the events in Columbus as the earliest manifestation of an annual spring holiday to decorate the grave of Southern soldiers. While the call was to celebrate on April 26, several newspapers reported that the day was the 25th, in error; as a result of Forrest preventing the Union Army from reaching Columbus, its antebellum homes were spared from being burned or destroyed, making its collection second only to Natchez as the most extensive in Mississippi. These antebellum homes may be toured during the annual Pilgrimage, in which the Columbus residences open their homes to tourists from around the country; when Union troops approached Jackson, the state capital was moved to Columbus before moving to a more permanent home in Macon. During the war, Columbus attorney Jacob H. Sharp served as a brigadier general in the Confederate Army. After the war, he owned the Columbus Independent newspaper, he was elected to two terms in the State House, serving four years representing the district in the Mississippi House of Representatives.
The mural Out of the Soil was completed in 1939 for the Columbus post office by WPA Section of Painting and Sculpture artist Bealah Betterworth. Murals were produced from 1934 to 1943 in the United States through "the Section" of the U. S. Treasury Department. Columbus has hosted Columbus Air Force Base since World War II. CAFB was founded as a flight training school. After a stint in the 1950s and 1960s as a Strategic Air Command base (earning Columbus a spo
William Tecumseh Sherman
William Tecumseh Sherman was an American soldier, businessman and author. He served as a general in the Union Army during the American Civil War, for which he received recognition for his outstanding command of military strategy as well as criticism for the harshness of the scorched earth policies he implemented in conducting total war against the Confederate States. Sherman was born into a prominent political family, he was stationed in California. He married Ellen Ewing Sherman and together they raised eight children. Sherman's wife and children were all devout Catholics, while Sherman was a member of the faith but left it. In 1859, he gained a position as superintendent of the Louisiana State Seminary of Learning & Military Academy. Living in the South, Sherman grew to respect Southern culture and sympathize with the practice of Southern slavery, although he opposed secession. Sherman began his Civil War career serving with distinction in the First Battle of Bull Run before being transferred to the Western Theater.
He served in Kentucky in 1861, where he acted overly paranoid, exaggerating the presence of spies in the region and providing what seemed to be alarmingly high estimates of the number of troops needed to pacify Kentucky. He was granted leave, fell into depression. Sherman returned to serve under General Ulysses S. Grant in the winter of 1862 during the battles of forts Henry and Donelson. Before the Battle of Shiloh, Sherman commanded a division. Failing to make proper preparations for a Confederate offensive, his men were overrun, he rallied his division and helped drive the Confederates back. Sherman served in the Siege of Corinth and commanded the XV Corps during the Vicksburg Campaign, which led to the fall of the critical Confederate stronghold of Vicksburg on the Mississippi River. After Grant was promoted to command of all Western armies, Sherman took over the Army of the Tennessee and led it during the Chattanooga Campaign, which culminated with the routing of the Confederate armies in the state of Tennessee.
In 1864, Sherman succeeded Grant as the Union commander in the western theater of the war. He proceeded to lead his troops to the capture of the city of Atlanta, a military success that contributed to the re-election of Abraham Lincoln. Sherman's subsequent march through Georgia and the Carolinas further undermined the Confederacy's ability to continue fighting by destroying large amounts of supplies and demoralizing the Southern people; the tactics that he used during this march, though effective, remain a subject of controversy. He accepted the surrender of all the Confederate armies in the Carolinas and Florida in April 1865, after having been present at most major military engagements in the West; when Grant assumed the U. S. presidency in 1869, Sherman succeeded him as Commanding General of the Army, in which capacity he served from 1869 until 1883. As such, he was responsible for the U. S. Army's engagement in the Indian Wars over the next 15 years. Sherman advocated total war against hostile Indians to force them back onto their reservations.
He was skeptical of the Reconstruction era policies of the federal government in the South. Sherman steadfastly refused to be drawn into politics and in 1875 published his Memoirs, one of the best-known first-hand accounts of the Civil War. British military historian B. H. Liddell Hart declared that Sherman was "the first modern general". Sherman was born in 1820 in Lancaster, near the banks of the Hocking River, his father, Charles Robert Sherman, a successful lawyer who sat on the Ohio Supreme Court, died unexpectedly in 1829. He left Mary Hoyt Sherman, with eleven children and no inheritance. After his father's death, the nine-year-old Sherman was raised by a Lancaster neighbor and family friend, attorney Thomas Ewing, Sr. a prominent member of the Whig Party who served as senator from Ohio and as the first Secretary of the Interior. Sherman grew to admire him. Sherman's older brother. One of his younger brothers, John Sherman, served as a U. S. senator and Cabinet secretary. Another younger brother, Hoyt Sherman, was a successful banker.
Two of his foster brothers served as major generals in the Union Army during the Civil War: Hugh Boyle Ewing an ambassador and author, Thomas Ewing, Jr. who would serve as defense attorney in the military trials of the Lincoln conspirators. Sherman would marry his foster sister, Ellen Boyle Ewing, at age 30 and have eight children with her. Sherman's unusual given name has always attracted considerable attention. Sherman reported that his middle name came from his father having "caught a fancy for the great chief of the Shawnees,'Tecumseh'". Since an account in a 1932 biography about Sherman, it has been reported that, as an infant, Sherman was named Tecumseh. According to these accounts, Sherman only acquired the name "William" at age nine or ten, after being taken into the Ewing household, his foster mother, Maria Willis Boyle, was of a devout Roman Catholic. Sherman was raised in a Roman Catholic household, although he left the church, citing the effect of the Civil War on his religious views.
According to a story that may be myth, Sherman was baptized in the Ewing home by a Dominican priest, who named him William for the saint's day: June 25, the feast day of Saint William of Montevergine. The story is contested, however. Sherman wrote in his Memoirs; as a
Mississippi
Mississippi is a state located in the southeastern region of the United States. Mississippi is the 32nd most 34th most populous of the 50 United States, it is bordered by Tennessee to the north, Alabama to the east, the Gulf of Mexico and Louisiana to the south, Arkansas and Louisiana to the west. The state's western boundary is defined by the Mississippi River. Jackson, with a population of 167,000 people, is both the state's capital and largest city; the state is forested outside the Mississippi Delta area, the area between the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers. Before the American Civil War, most development in the state was along riverfronts, as the waterways were critical for transportation. Large gangs of slaves were used to work on cotton plantations. After the war, freedmen began to clear the bottomlands to the interior, in the process selling off timber and buying property. By the end of the 19th century, African Americans made up two-thirds of the Delta's property owners, but timber and railroad companies acquired much of the land after the financial crisis, which occurred when blacks were facing increasing racial discrimination and disfranchisement in the state.
Clearing of the land for plantations altered the Delta's ecology, increasing the severity of flooding along the Mississippi by taking out trees and bushes that had absorbed excess waters. Much land is now held by agribusinesses. A rural state with agricultural areas dominated by industrial farms, Mississippi is ranked low or last among the states in such measures as health, educational attainment, median household income; the state's catfish aquaculture farms produce the majority of farm-raised catfish consumed in the United States. Since the 1930s and the Great Migration of African Americans to the North and West, the majority of Mississippi's population has been white, although the state still has the highest percentage of black residents of any U. S. state. From the early 19th century to the 1930s, its residents were majority black, before the American Civil War that population was composed of African-American slaves. Democratic Party whites retained political power through disfranchisement and Jim Crow laws.
In the first half of the 20th century, nearly 400,000 rural blacks left the state for work and opportunities in northern and midwestern cities, with another wave of migration around World War II to West Coast cities. In the early 1960s, Mississippi was the poorest state in the nation, with 86% of its non-whites living below the poverty level. In 2010, 37% of Mississippians were African Americans, the highest percentage of African Americans in any U. S. state. Since regaining enforcement of their voting rights in the late 1960s, most African Americans have supported Democratic candidates in local and national elections. Conservative whites have shifted to the Republican Party. African Americans are a majority in many counties of the Mississippi-Yazoo Delta, an area of historic slave settlement during the plantation era; the state's name is derived from the Mississippi River. Settlers named it after the Ojibwe word misi-ziibi. Mississippi is bordered to the north by Tennessee, to the east by Alabama, to the south by Louisiana and a narrow coast on the Gulf of Mexico.
In addition to its namesake, major rivers in Mississippi include the Big Black River, the Pearl River, the Yazoo River, the Pascagoula River, the Tombigbee River. Major lakes include Ross Barnett Reservoir, Arkabutla Lake, Sardis Lake, Grenada Lake with the largest lake being Sardis Lake. Mississippi is composed of lowlands, the highest point being Woodall Mountain, in the foothills of the Cumberland Mountains, 807 feet above sea level; the lowest point is sea level at the Gulf Coast. The state's mean elevation is 300 feet above sea level. Most of Mississippi is part of the East Gulf Coastal Plain; the coastal plain is composed of low hills, such as the Pine Hills in the south and the North Central Hills. The Pontotoc Ridge and the Fall Line Hills in the northeast have somewhat higher elevations. Yellow-brown loess soil is found in the western parts of the state; the northeast is a region of fertile black earth. The coastline includes large bays at Bay St. Louis and Pascagoula, it is separated from the Gulf of Mexico proper by the shallow Mississippi Sound, sheltered by Petit Bois Island, Horn Island and West Ship Islands, Deer Island, Round Island, Cat Island.
The northwest remainder of the state consists of the Mississippi Delta, a section of the Mississippi Alluvial Plain. The plain widens north of Vicksburg; the region has rich soil made up of silt, deposited by the flood waters of the Mississippi River. Areas under the management of the National Park Service include: Brices Cross Roads National Battlefield Site near Baldwyn Gulf Islands National Seashore Natchez National Historical Park in Natchez Natchez Trace National Scenic Trail in Tupelo Natchez Trace Parkway Tupelo National Battlefield in Tupelo Vicksburg National Military Park and Cemetery in Vicksburg Mississippi City Population Rankings of at least 50,000: Mississippi City Population Rankings of at least 20,000 but fewer than 50,000: Mississippi City Population Rankings of at least 10,000 but fewer than 20,000: Mississippi has a humid
Nathan Bedford Forrest
Nathan Bedford Forrest was a Confederate Army general during the American Civil War. Before the war, Forrest had amassed substantial wealth as a cotton planter and cattle trader, real estate broker and slave trader. In June 1861, he enlisted in the Confederate Army, one of the few officers during the war to enlist as a private and be promoted general without any military training. An expert cavalry leader, Forrest was given command of a corps and established new doctrines for mobile forces, earning the nickname "The Wizard of the Saddle", his methods influenced many future generations of military strategists, although the Confederate high command is seen to have underutilized his talents. In April 1864, in what has been called "one of the bleakest, saddest events of American military history," troops under Forrest's command massacred Union troops who had surrendered, most of them black soldiers, along with some white Southern Tennesseans fighting for the Union, at the Battle of Fort Pillow.
Forrest was blamed for the massacre in the Union press, that news may have strengthened the North's resolve. Forrest joined the Ku Klux Klan in 1867, two years after its founding, was elected its first Grand Wizard; the group was a loose collection of local groups that used violence and the threat of violence to maintain white control over the newly-enfranchised slaves. While Forrest was a Klan leader, during the elections of 1868, the Klan suppressed voting rights of blacks and Republicans in the South through violence and intimidation. In 1869, Forrest expressed disillusionment with the lack of discipline among the various white supremacist groups across the South, issued a letter ordering the dissolution of the Ku Klux Klan and the destruction of its costumes. Lacking coordinated leadership and facing strong opposition from President Grant, this first incarnation of the Klan disappeared. In the last years of his life, Forrest publicly denounced the violence and racism of the Klan, insisted he had never been a member, made at least one public speech in favor of racial harmony.
He and his wife moved onto President's Island in late 1875, established a home and started a business venture that relied on the Convict Lease System enacted in 1866 by the state of Mississippi, to secure a labor force of 117 convicts whose sentence would be served in clearing and cultivating 800 acres of the 1300 that Forrest had leased. "Among those convicts in his employ were eighteen black and four white female prisoners along with thirty-five white and sixty black male convicts who worked the land on Forrest's island plantation."Although scholars admire Forrest as a military strategist, he has remained a controversial figure in Southern history for his role in the attack on Fort Pillow, his 1867–1869 leadership of the Ku Klux Klan, his political influence as a Tennessee delegate at the 1868 Democratic National Convention. Nathan Bedford Forrest was born on July 13, 1821 to a poor settler family in a secluded frontier cabin near Chapel Hill hamlet part of Bedford County, but now encompassed in Marshall County.
Forrest was the first son of Mariam Forrest. His father William was of English descent and most of his biographers state that his mother Mariam was of Scotch-Irish descent, but the Memphis Genealogical Society says that she was of English descent as well, he and his twin sister, were the two eldest of blacksmith William Forrest's 12 children with wife Miriam Beck. Forrest's great-grandfather, Shadrach Forrest of English birth, moved from Virginia to North Carolina, between 1730–1740, there his son and grandson were born. Forrest's family lived in a log house from 1830 to 1833. John Allan Wyeth, who served in an Alabama regiment under Forrest, described it as a one-room building with a loft and no windows. William Forrest worked as a blacksmith in Tennessee until 1834. William died in 1837 and Forrest became the primary caretaker of the family at the age of sixteen. In 1841 Forrest went into business with his uncle Jonathan Forrest in Mississippi, his uncle was killed there in 1845 during an argument with the Matlock brothers.
In retaliation, Forrest shot and killed two of them with his two-shot pistol and wounded two others with a knife, thrown to him. One of the wounded Matlock men served under Forrest during the Civil War. Forrest became a successful businessman and slaveholder, he acquired several cotton plantations in the Delta region of West Tennessee. He was a slave trader, at a time when demand was booming in the Deep South. In 1858, Forrest served two consecutive terms. By the time the American Civil War started in 1861, he had become one of the richest men in the South, having amassed a "personal fortune that he claimed was worth $1.5 million". Forrest was well known as Mississippi gambler. In 1859, he bought two large cotton plantations in Coahoma County, Mississippi and a half-interest in another plantation in Arkansas. Forrest had 12 sisters, he contracted the disease, but survived. His mother Miriam married James Horatio Luxton, of Marshall, Texas, in 1843 and gave birt
Macon, Mississippi
Macon is a city in Noxubee County, Mississippi along the Noxubee River. The population was 2,461 at the 2000 census, it is the county seat of Noxubee County. In 1817 the Jackson Military Road was built at the urging of Andrew Jackson to provide a direct connection between Nashville and New Orleans; the road crossed the Noxubee River just west of Macon, located at the old Choctaw village of Taladega, now the site of the local golf club. The road declined in importance in the 1840s due to the difficulty of travel in the swamps surrounding the Noxubee River in and west of Macon; the route for the most part was replaced by the Robinson Road, which ran through Agency and Louisville before joining the Natchez Trace, bypassing Macon. On September 15, 1830, US government officials met with an audience of 6,000 Choctaw men and children at Dancing Rabbit Creek to explain the policy of removal through interpreters; the Choctaws faced migration west of the Mississippi River or submitting to U. S. and state law as citizens.
The treaty would sign away the remaining traditional homeland to the United States. The town was named Macon on August 10, 1835 in honor of Nathaniel Macon, a statesman from North Carolina; the city served as the capital for the state of Mississippi during the Civil War from 1863 onward. The legislature was housed in the Calhoun Institute, which housed Governor Charles Clark's office and served as one of several hospital sites in Macon. In October 1865, Governor Benjamin Humphreys attempted to retrieve the furniture from the governor's mansion to Jackson, however it had been either destroyed or stolen. In 1871, William Coleman, a black Macon resident who failed to tip his hat to a white man, was shot, stabbed and left for dead by the Ku Klux Klan. Coleman survived and testified about his ordeal before congress. On January 1, 1898, James Jones was lynched in Macon. On June 30, 1898, Henry Williams, was lynched after being accused of rape. On February 18, 1901, Fred Isham and Henry Isham were lynched in Macon.
On May 4, 1912, George Somerville was taken from the sheriff and hanged by a mob for an alleged shooting. On May 7, 1912, G. W. Edd was lynched On May 12, 1927, Dan Anderson was lynched in Macon. On June 27, 1919, in an incident described as part of the Red Summer, a mob of white citizens including a banker and a deputy sheriff, among many others, attacked prominent black citizens. In 2016, Macon was the poorest town in the United States. According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 1.5 square miles, all land. As of the census of 2000, there were 2,461 people, 906 households, 587 families residing in the city; the population density was 1,624.8 people per square mile. There were 1,015 housing units at an average density of 670.1 per square mile. The racial makeup of the city was 31.49% White, 67.33% African American, 0.20% Native American, 0.41% Asian, 0.08% from other races, 0.49% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 0.41% of the population. There were 906 households out of which 32.6% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 34.0% were married couples living together, 27.5% had a female householder with no husband present, 35.1% were non-families.
33.1% of all households were made up of individuals and 16.3% had someone living alone, 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.53 and the average family size was 3.25. In the city, the population was spread out with 28.9% under the age of 18, 10.3% from 18 to 24, 27.8% from 25 to 44, 16.2% from 45 to 64, 16.8% who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 33 years. For every 100 females, there were 82.6 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 80.5 males. The median income for a household in the city was $20,800, the median income for a family was $26,696. Males had a median income of $22,969 versus $16,898 for females; the per capita income for the city was $12,568. About 29.2% of families and 36.0% of the population were below the poverty line, including 50.3% of those under age 18 and 21.8% of those age 65 or over. Ben Ames Williams, novelist Buster Barnett, former NFL player for the Buffalo Bills Carey Bell, blues harmonicist Cornelius Cash, basketball player Darion Conner, former professional football player with the Atlanta Falcons Willie Daniel, NFL football player Jesse Fortune, blues singer Victoria Clay Haley, suffragist Nate Hughes, former professional football player with Jacksonville Jaguars, Detroit Lions Samuel Pandolfo, businessman America W. Robinson, African American educator.
In 1917, the city proposed consolidation of the school district with Noxubee County, with the goal of replacing the single-teacher system prevalent throughout the county. The City of Macon is now served by the Noxubee County School District. East Mississippi Community College offers some courses at Noxubee County High School in Macon; when federal courts mandated integration of the public schools, a segregation academy, Central Academy, was built in Macon, secretly using public school funds to construct the private school. White student enrollment in public schools dropped from 829 to 71 during this period. Attendance at Central Academy dwindled to 51 students, resulting in the shuttering of the school following the 2017 school
Mobile and Ohio Railroad
The Mobile and Ohio Railroad was a railroad in the Southern U. S; the M&O was chartered in January and February 1848 by the states of Alabama, Kentucky and Tennessee. It was planned to span the distance between the seaport of Mobile and the Ohio River near Cairo, Illinois. On September 13, 1940 it was merged with the Gulf and Northern Railroad to form the Gulf and Ohio Railroad. At the end of 1925 M&O operated 1,536 miles of track; the Mobile and Ohio Railroad was conceived after hard times in Mobile following the Panic of 1837. The port was not generating the business that it had before the panic and businessmen and citizens in the city were inspired with a plan for a railroad to restore commerce to the city; the first section of track opened for service in 1852 between Mobile and Citronelle and was constructed in 5 ft gauge. The line made it to Columbus, Kentucky on April 22, 1861, steamboats were used to connect with the Illinois Central Railroad at Cairo; the start of the Civil War shortly after the completion of the line saw it converted to military use and it became a military target for both sides during the war.
Following the conflict the M&O had to be entirely rebuilt and was facing near total financial ruin due in part to an unpaid debt of $5,228,562, owed by the Confederate government. It did not emerge until eight years later. By 1870 the operators had seen the need to complete the line all the way to Cairo and make it the northern terminus instead of Columbus, but financial problems stood in the way. On May 1, 1882 the extension to Cairo was opened; the company acquired the St. Louis and Cairo Railroad, narrow gauge, they had a line from Mobile to St. Louis, Missouri. In 1896 the company decided to build a line from its Columbus, terminal toward Florida. On June 30, 1898 the Tuscaloosa to Montgomery line opened in Alabama, along with two short branch lines; that same year they decided to build a 39-mile line from Mobile to Alabama Port and Bayou La Batre, naming it the Mobile and Bay Shore Railway. It was completed in 1899; the M&O's stockholders and bondholders accepted a stock exchange plan in 1901 from Southern Railway.
A merger of the two was vetoed by Mississippi governor James K. Vardaman. Thereafter the M&O continued operations under Southern's control. From 1908 the M&O was considered to be a prosperous railroad, but net income declined after 1926 and by 1930 the M&O had a net deficit of $1,000,000. On June 3, 1932, the M&O went into receivership again. Southern was accused of having violated the Clayton Antitrust Act by using the M&O for its own profit at the expense of the M&O, though the case was dropped in 1933. Southern sold its M&O bonds in 1940 to the Gulf and Northern Railroad; the GM&N was combined with the M&O to form the Gulf and Ohio Railroad. List of defunct Alabama railroads List of defunct Illinois railroads List of defunct Kentucky railroads List of defunct Mississippi railroads List of defunct Missouri railroads List of defunct Tennessee railroads Timeline and 1935 system map of the M&O Brief history, 1902 map, photographs of M&O locomotives
