Magnolia, Mississippi

Magnolia was founded in eighteen fifty-six by Ansel Prewitt, a wealthy Pike County landowner who deeded a right-of-way through his plantation to the New Orleans, Jackson and Great Northern Railroad. It was a calculating move: wherever the train stopped, commerce and population followed. Prewitt's gamble paid off.

Holmesville had been Pike County's seat since eighteen sixteen, named for an officer killed in the War of eighteen twelve. But Holmesville sat off the rail line, and by eighteen seventy-three the county had seen enough. Voters moved the seat to Magnolia. The same story played out across the South in the decades after the Civil War: courthouse towns that missed the railroad lost their primacy to smaller places that caught it. Magnolia, the county seat of Pike County, is a clean example of that transfer of power.