Ellisville: Seat of the Free State of Jones
Mississippi
Ellisville was founded in eighteen twenty-six as the first seat of Jones County, named for Powhatan Ellis, a Virginia-born U.S. Senator. But the courthouse that bore his name became famous for a very different reason during the Civil War.
Jones County was poor Piney Woods territory, a region of small subsistence farms with few enslaved people and little stake in the Confederate cause. When the Confederate government imposed a draft, resentment boiled into open resistance. A farmer named Newton Knight organized deserters and unionists into a guerrilla company, and in the spring of eighteen sixty-four, they overthrew Confederate authority in the county and raised the United States flag over this very courthouse in Ellisville. The episode became known as the Free State of Jones, the legend of a county that refused to secede from the Union. A twenty sixteen film brought the story to wider audiences, but the courthouse square had been telling it for more than a century and a half.
