Franklin, Mississippi

Franklin is an unincorporated community located in Holmes County, Mississippi.[1] Mississippi Highway 17 passes through Franklin, which is approximately 7 miles (11 km) south of Lexington, the county seat, and approximately 12 miles (19 km) north of the town of Pickens.

Franklin, Mississippi
Unincorporated community
Franklin Church, built 1841
Franklin Franklin
Coordinates: 33°02′09″N 90°00′07″W
Country	United States
State	Mississippi
County	Holmes
Elevation	331 ft (101 m)
Time zone	UTC-6 (Central (CST))
• Summer (DST)	UTC-5 (CDT)
ZIP code	39095
Area code(s)	662
GNIS feature ID	670157[1]

This was long an area of cotton plantations. In the antebellum era, labor was provided by thousands of enslaved African Americans. After the war, many freedmen continued to work the land as sharecroppers and tenant farmers.

History

Franklin was an early place of European-American settlement and developing cotton plantations from the 1830s, when most of the Choctaw people were removed to Indian Territory west of the Mississippi River. The American migrants were mostly from planter families in South Carolina and Virginia, and brought numerous slaves with them. Others they bought through the domestic slave trade to develop their extensive lands for cotton plantations.

Located a short distance east of the settlement is the Franklin Church and Cemetery.[2] Erected in 1841 from labor by enslaved African Americans, the church had two front entrances, one for men and one for women.[3]

On January 2, 1865, during the Civil War, this was a battlefield in an engagement involving 3,300 Federal mounted troops and 1,100 Confederate Home Guards led by General William Wirt Adams. The Union Army won this battle and took numerous prisoners.[3][4] The Franklin Presbyterian Church is still in use; its congregation has decided to keep the cannonball holes from the Civil War left visible as a reminder of its history.[4]

In 1900 the white population was 80, and the settlement had a post office in the early 1900s.[5]

References

1. U.S. Geological Survey Geographic Names Information System: Franklin
2. "Franklin Church". Geographic Names Information System. United States Geological Survey.
3. "Pictorial History: Mississippi in Architecture". W.P.A. Historical Research Project. 1938.
4. "Historic Places Not On the National Register". United States National Park Service.
5. Rowland, Dunbar (1907). Mississippi: Comprising Sketches of Counties, Towns, Events, Institutions, and Persons, Arranged in Cyclopedic Form. 1. Southern Historical Publishing Association. p. 742.