Newton, Mississippi

Newton County was carved out of the Choctaw cession following the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek and organized in eighteen thirty-six. The town of Newton, the county's largest city, grew up later as a railroad town on the old Vicksburg and Meridian line, one of the east-west routes that stitched Mississippi together in the decades before the Civil War. The county takes its name from the scientist Isaac Newton, an unusual choice in an era when Southern counties more often honored soldiers and politicians.

Newton station became an important stop on what grew into the Alabama and Vicksburg Railroad, and the town around it developed into the commercial center for an agricultural county built on cotton and timber. Today Newton remains a small city, quiet except for the twice-daily rumble of freight trains on the same corridor the railroads first surveyed nearly a century and a half ago.