Enterprise: A Governor's Town on the Chickasawhay

Enterprise, Mississippi was founded in eighteen thirty-four by John J. McRae, who would later serve as Governor of Mississippi. The town sits on the Chickasawhay River, and in its early years it functioned as a trading point between the first American settlers and the Choctaw people who had lived in east Mississippi for generations before the land cessions of eighteen thirty.

McRae chose the name deliberately, saying it was meant to reflect the spirit of the town's inhabitants. Two railroads eventually converged here, the Mobile and Ohio and the New Orleans and Northeastern, connecting Enterprise to the Gulf Coast timber trade that defined Clarke County's economy for decades. The county's vast pine forests fed the mills; the rails moved the lumber. Enterprise was a small but strategically placed node in that network, a river town turned railroad junction, founded by a future governor and named for an idea.