Holly Springs, Mississippi

European Americans founded Holly Springs in 1836 on territory occupied by Chickasaw Indians for centuries before Indian Removal. Most of their land was ceded under the Treaty of Pontotoc Creek of 1832.[5][6][7] Many early U.S. migrants were from Virginia,[6] supplemented by migrants from Georgia and the Carolinas.[7]

In 1836, the city had 4,000 European-American residents.[6] A year later, records show that 40 residents were lawyers,[6] and there were six physicians by 1838.[7] By 1837, the town already had "twenty dry goods stores, two drugstores, three banks, several hotels, and over ten saloons."[6] It is also home to Hillcrest Cemetery, built on land settler William S. Randolph gave the city in 1837.[8]

Newcomers established the Chalmers Institute, later known as the University of Holly Springs, Mississippi's oldest university.[9][10]

The area was developed with extensive cotton plantations dependent on the labor of enslaved African Americans. Many had been transported from the Upper South in the domestic slave trade, breaking up families.[6] The settlement served as a trading center for the neighboring cotton plantations. In 1837, it was made seat of the newly created Marshall County,[6] named for John Marshall, the United States Supreme Court justice. The town developed a variety of merchants and businesses to support the plantations. Its population into the early twentieth century included a community of Jewish merchants, whose ancestors were immigrants from eastern Europe in the 19th century.[11] The cotton industry suffered in the crisis of 1840, but soon recovered.[6]

By 1855 Holly Springs was connected to Grand Junction, Tennessee, by the Mississippi Central Railway.[12] In ensuing years, the line was completed to the south of Hill Springs. Toward the end of the 19th century, the Kansas City, Memphis and Birmingham Railroad was constructed to intersect this line in Holly Springs.

During the American Civil War, Union General Ulysses S. Grant temporarily used Holly Springs as a supply depot and headquarters. He was mounting an effort to take the city of Vicksburg.[6] Confederate Earl Van Dorn led the successful Holly Springs Raid on the town in December 1862, destroying most of the Union supplies at the Confederate Armory Site.[6] The campus of the Holly Springs Female Institute, which had been open since 1836, was also burned, forcing it to permanently close. Grant eventually succeeded in ending the siege of Vicksburg with a Union victory.

In 1878, Holly Springs suffered a yellow fever epidemic,[6] part of a regional epidemic that spread through the river towns. 1,400 residents became ill and 300 died.[6] The Marshall County Courthouse, at the center of Holly Springs's square, was used as a hospital during the epidemic.[5]

After the war and emancipation, many freedmen stayed in the area, working as sharecroppers on former plantations.[6] There were tensions after the war. As agriculture was mechanized in the early 20th century, there were fewer farm labor jobs. From 1900 to 1910, a quarter of the population left the city. Many blacks moved to the North in the Great Migration to escape southern oppression and seek employment in northern factories. The invasion of boll weevils in the 1920s and 1930s, which occurred across the South, destroyed the cotton crops and caused economic problems on top of the Great Depression.[6] Some light industry developed in the area.[6] After World War II, most industries moved to the major cities of Memphis, Tennessee and Birmingham, Alabama.[6]

According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has an area of 12.7 square miles (33 km²), of which 12.7 square miles (33 km²) is land and 0.04 square miles (0.10 km²) (0.16%) is water.

The City of Holly Springs is served by the Holly Springs School District.

Marshall Academy is a private institution for the MPSA, offering k-4 through 12th grade. Rust College was established in 1866 by the Freedman's Aid Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church to serve freedmen and is a historically black college.

The now defunct Mississippi Industrial College, intended as a vocational training school, was in Holly Springs, as was the Holly Springs Female Institute.

• James F. Trotter (1802–1866), judge and U.S. Senator who resided in Holly Springs until his death.[21]
• Spires Boling (1812–1880), architect and builder[22]
• Winfield S. Featherston (1820–1891), two-term member of United States House of Representatives, Confederate brigadier general during the Civil War, later a state politician and circuit court judge.
• Hiram Rhodes Revels (1822–1901), first African American to serve in the United States Senate;first president of Alcorn State University; taught theology at Shaw University (present-day Rust College).[23]
• Edward Cary Walthall (1831–1898), Confederate general, lawyer, and U.S. Senator from Mississippi
• Ida B. Wells (1862–1931), African-American journalist, anti-lynching activist, and advocate for civil rights and women's rights; born in Holly Springs.[24]
• Absolom M. West (1818–1894), planter, politician, Civil War general and labor organizer, resided in Holly Springs after the American Civil War until his death.
• Verina Morton Jones (1865–1943), African-American physician and the first woman to practice medicine in the state; served as resident physician at Rust College
• Edward Hull "Boss" Crump (1874–1954), head of the dominant Democratic Party political machine in Memphis during the first half of the 20th century, was born in Holly Springs
• Kate Freeman Clark (1875–1957), painter[25]
• Wall Doxey (1892–1962), Mississippi politician, served as Congressman and United States Senator; Wall Doxey State Park was named after him
• Lation Scott (1893-1917), African American lynching victim
• Irving Vendig (1902–1995), television writer
• William Baskerville Hamilton (1908-1972), historian who taught public school in Holly Springs in the 1930s[26]
• Clifton DeBerry (1924–2006), born in Holly Springs, was the first African American nominated for President of the United States by a political party (Socialist Workers Party, 1964, 1980)
• R. L. Burnside (1926–2005), blues musician
• Junior Kimbrough (1930–1998), blues musician
• Gary Montez Martin (1973–2019), perpetrator of the 2019 Aurora, Illinois shooting
• Syl Johnson (1936-2022), blues and soul singer
• Robert Belfour (1940-2015), blues musician
• Cassi Davis (born 1964), actress.[27]
• Shepard Smith (born 1964), American broadcast journalist for NBC News and CNBC, born in Holly Springs.[28] Attended high school at Marshall Academy, one of the private schools in town.
• Clinton LeSueur (born 1969), Republican politician; he lost races in 2002 and 2004 for Mississippi's 2nd congressional district to incumbent Democrat Bennie Thompson
• Seth Adams (born 1985), University of Mississippi American football quarterback
• Jeremy LeSueur (born 1980), University of Michigan American football defensive back.[29]
• Paul Maholm (born 1982), pitcher for the Los Angeles Dodgers.[30]
• Mel and Tim (Mel Hardin and Tim McPherson), soul musicians from Holly Springs who recorded at Stax Records in Memphis
• Charlie Feathers, (1932-1998), rockabilly musician

• The 1999 movie Cookie's Fortune was set and filmed in Holly Springs.

Town square in Holly Springs

• The Jackson, Mississippi, band The Weeks sing about Holly Springs in their 2014 song "Brother in the Night."
• Graceland Too, a museum dedicated to Elvis Presley has been referenced in songs by Parquet Courts and Phoebe Bridgers

• Hillcrest Cemetery
• Strawberry Plains Audubon Center

Wikivoyage has a travel guide for Holly Springs.

• Holly Springs Ledger, 1837-1904 (MUM00232) at the University of Mississippi.