Summit, Mississippi

Summit got its name from a misunderstanding. When the Illinois Central Railroad laid tracks here in the late eighteen fifties, surveyors believed they had reached the highest elevation on the entire line between New Orleans and Jackson, Tennessee, and so they called the stop Summit. They were wrong.

Nearby Brookhaven actually holds that distinction. But the name stuck. The town incorporated not long after the railroad arrived, and merchants, many of them immigrants, set up shop along the main street, drawn south by the economic promise of a railroad junction in Pike County.

Today Summit is a quiet town of about fifteen hundred people, tucked into the piney hills just north of McComb.