Hernando, Mississippi: Named for a Conquistador

DeSoto County was carved out of land ceded by the Chickasaw Nation under the Treaty of Pontotoc in eighteen thirty-two, and when Mississippi established the county in eighteen thirty-six, lawmakers chose to honor the sixteenth-century Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto, the man who crossed this very region in fifteen forty while searching for gold. The new county seat took the explorer's first name. A merchant named Edward Orne donated forty acres for the public square, and surveyors laid out one hundred seventy-two lots around it in eighteen thirty-six.

That original courthouse square is still recognizable today, more than one hundred eighty years later. The grid has held, and Hernando has been the seat of DeSoto County ever since.