Coldwater: Elm Grove Renamed by Its Depot
Mississippi
The town that is now Coldwater, Mississippi, started life as Elm Grove. In the middle of the eighteen fifties, the Mississippi and Tennessee Railroad completed its line through here, and the company called its stop Coldwater, after the Coldwater River about two miles to the north. Rows of stores and churches developed along both sides of the tracks, as they did in almost every Delta county when a railroad arrived.
The settlement liked the railroad's name better than its own and switched to Coldwater. The town incorporated in eighteen seventy-two. When Tate County was carved out of DeSoto, Marshall, and Tunica counties in eighteen seventy-three, Coldwater found itself inside the new boundary.
It remains a small town in Tate County today, the Coldwater River still flowing a couple of miles to the north, the old depot long gone but the name it left behind still in use.
