Batesville: The Train Stole the County Seat

When Panola County was established in eighteen thirty-six, the county seat was a settlement called Panola, located on the Tallahatchie River. Rival towns on either side of the river competed for the courthouse. Then the Mississippi and Tennessee Railroad laid its tracks from Memphis south toward Grenada, and the line ran directly through a new depot called Batesville, not through Panola.

Trains were running through by the late eighteen fifties, and Panola was absorbed into the new railroad town of Batesville. Because the Tallahatchie River made travel hard, the county ended up with two county seats, Batesville and Sardis, which it still has today. The town that won the railroad won the county, which is how it worked across the Delta in the years before the Civil War.