Tupelo: Elvis, Forrest, and the Railroad That Won the War

Tupelo holds two stories that sit far apart in time but close together in American mythology , one about a battle that helped end the Civil War, and one about a boy born in a two-room house who reshaped American music.

Start with the battle. In the summer of eighteen sixty-four, William Tecumseh Sherman was driving toward Atlanta. His entire campaign depended on a single railroad supply line running south from Nashville through Tennessee. Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest had already proven he could raid that line, and Sherman was terrified. So he dispatched Union General Andrew J. Smith with more than fourteen thousand men into northeast Mississippi with one explicit mission: find Forrest and stop him.

The two forces collided here, outside Tupelo, on July fourteenth, eighteen sixty-four. The Confederate commander, Stephen D. Lee, ordered a series of frontal assaults on Smith's fortified Union positions. It was badly coordinated and catastrophic. Confederate forces suffered heavy casualties and were repulsed. Forrest himself was wounded in the foot. The Confederates retreated, Sherman's supply line held, Atlanta fell that September, and the war turned decisively. Tupelo National Battlefield, just north of downtown, preserves one acre of the site , one of the smallest units in the entire National Park System, but one of the most consequential patches of ground in the western theater.

Seventy years later, on January eighth, nineteen thirty-five, Elvis Aaron Presley was born less than a mile from here, in a shotgun house his father Vernon had built with borrowed money , one hundred eighty dollars in materials, two rooms, a porch, and a single bare bulb in each room. His twin brother Jessie Garon was stillborn that same morning. The family lost the house when Elvis was about three; the bank foreclosed. They moved around Tupelo for eleven more years before leaving for Memphis in nineteen forty-eight, carrying almost nothing.

That house on Elvis Presley Drive still stands, restored to how it looked in January of nineteen thirty-five. The Assembly of God church where a young Elvis first heard gospel music has been relocated to the grounds beside it. Together they form Mississippi's most-visited historic site , the origin point of rock and roll, in a town that also saved Sherman's army.