Purvis: Sawmill Town, County Seat

Thomas Melville Purves came to Marion County, Mississippi in eighteen seventy with a land grant and his wife and five surviving children. He homesteaded the land, built a life, and the settlement that grew around him took a version of his name. Purvis incorporated on February twenty-fifth, eighteen eighty-eight.

The town grew up along the New Orleans and Northeastern Railroad as a sawmill community, with the timber industry driving its economy. When Lamar County was carved from Marion County in nineteen oh four, Purvis was chosen as its county seat, a designation it still holds. The county itself was named for Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar, the Mississippi-born statesman who served on the United States Supreme Court. Purvis has stayed small, but it has been the center of county government for over a century, a sawmill town that outlasted the mills.