Brookhaven: A New Yorker Named It After Home

In eighteen eighteen, a man named Samuel Jayne emigrated from Long Island, New York, to the territory that would become Mississippi and settled on land near the Bogue Chitto River, in what had been Choctaw Nation. He named his new settlement Brookhaven, after the town of Brookhaven on Long Island where he had grown up. It became the county seat of Lincoln County when that county was established in eighteen seventy, named for President Abraham Lincoln during Reconstruction.

In nineteen fifteen, local merchants held a contest to find a slogan for the city. The winning phrase was Homeseeker's Paradise, and local tradition says the electric sign bearing it was first lit the night the Liberty Bell passed through town by train on its way home from the San Francisco World's Fair. The original sign was later lost and a replacement was erected in its spot.