Durant, Mississippi

The small city of Durant, sitting here in Holmes County, owes its name to a Choctaw leader named Louis Durant, who lived on a bluff just across the Big Black River before the United States forced the removal of his people in the eighteen thirties.

When the Mississippi Central Railroad pushed through this stretch of central Mississippi in eighteen fifty-eight, the new station took his name. The railroad drew the familiar pattern of a small Southern depot town: a cluster of merchants, cotton brokers, and homes rising quickly around the tracks. Today Durant is home to a few thousand people and is in Holmes County, whose seat is Lexington, one of the most rural stretches along the entire Interstate Fifty-Five corridor.