Marion: First Seat of Lauderdale County

When Mississippi created Lauderdale County in eighteen thirty-three out of Choctaw lands ceded at Dancing Rabbit Creek, this town became its first county seat. It was named for General Francis Marion, the Revolutionary War guerrilla leader known as the Swamp Fox, a popular honorific in the early American South.

Marion served as Lauderdale County's seat of government through the antebellum years and into Reconstruction. Then the county's center of gravity shifted. In eighteen seventy voters moved the seat to a railroad junction town growing fast enough to eclipse all its neighbors. That town was Meridian. Marion has been a small community ever since, but it holds a quiet distinction: it was the county's capital before the county's largest city existed.