Marion, Mississippi

History

The town was named for Francis Marion, a military leader known as the "Swamp Fox". Marion was Lauderdale County's seat from its founding to Reconstruction. Prior to the war, Marion was a prosperous town inhabited by numerous planters and enslaved African Americans. In 1840, it had a drugstore, two blacksmith shops, six dry goods stores, and two academies (one for girls and another for boys). It also had at least one newspaper, the Lauderdale Republican.

In 1850, Congress donated land to Alabama and Mississippi in order to build the Mobile & Ohio Railroad, which bypassed Marion and constructed a station two miles to the southwest in a village called McLemore's Old Field (now the city of Meridian). During the 1850s, land values in Lauderdale County increased by 176 percent, which allowed many non-slaveholding whites to purchase slaves to grow cotton, build roads, and clear the surrounding forests for cultivation. By 1860, Lauderdale County's enslaved population had more than doubled—a fact that fed support for secessionism after the election of Abraham Lincoln. On February 16, 1864, U.S. Army forces commanded by General William T. Sherman raided Marion and destroyed the railroad connecting it to Meridian. In 1870, voters opted to move the county seat from Marion to Meridian, which had expanded rapidly since the end of the Civil War.

From the History section of Marion, Mississippi on Wikipedia, under CC BY-SA 4.0.