Holly Springs: Grant's Headquarters and Ida B. Wells

Holly Springs, to your north, was one of the most prosperous towns in antebellum Mississippi. Founded in eighteen thirty-six at a cluster of springs ringed by holly trees, it became the commercial capital of the northern hill country, boasting forty lawyers by eighteen thirty-seven. In the Civil War, Ulysses S.

Grant made his headquarters here in the winter of eighteen sixty-two, filling the town with Union supplies. Confederate General Earl Van Dorn destroyed that depot in a December raid and set back Grant's Vicksburg campaign by months. Holly Springs also holds a quieter distinction: the house where Ida B.

Wells was born into slavery in eighteen sixty-two still stands here, now a museum bearing her name. Wells became the nation's leading anti-lynching journalist and a founding voice of the NAACP.