Tillatoba, Mississippi

The name Tillatoba comes from a Choctaw word purported to mean 'white dead tree,' borrowed from Tillatoba Creek. This small Yalobusha County community sits in the hill-country transition zone between the Mississippi Delta to the west and the red-clay uplands to the east, a boundary that shaped everything from soil type to crop choice for generations of farmers. Tillatoba today is a tiny town of fewer than one hundred people, but the name itself is a reminder that the Choctaw Nation held this land for centuries before the forced removal of the eighteen thirties sent most of them west along the Trail of Tears to Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma.