My Mississippi Manifest Destiny: The Natchez Trace Part Four, Ghost Town

Ghost towns in the damp and warm South are different than what you'll find in the West--nature is much more efficient in reclaiming its own with the aid of regular rainfall--and especially when the entire town, sans a church (which is still in use) was probably made of wood.

Such is the case of the former town of Rocky Springs, Mississippi. Here's what's left of it--the Methodist Chuch in the picture, a couple of abandoned safes with doors missing, and a few cisterns. Rocky Springs was founded in 1790 and its population peaked at 2,600 people around the time of the Civil War. But over the succeeding decades, soil erosion, a yellow fever epidemic, and the devastation brought to the cotton crop made Rocky Springs what it is today--a ghost town. The last store there closed in the 1930s, and the few residents there probably abandoned Rocky Spings for good.

North of Tupelo is a very small Confederate cemetery, just thirteen graves, which I wanted to include in my Natchez Trace Parkway series, but I just couldn't find the right post--until now--to place it.

For those people interested in learning more about Rocky Springs, I found the Civil War Album site with better photographs of Rocky Springs. I was handicapped by a dark thunderstorm clouds the afternoon I was there. Did I mention the south is damp and warm?

For my penultimate post in this series, I'll write about a ghost town in the making--in Illinois.

Next: Mississippi logging

Related post: My Kansas Kronikles: Smoky Valley Scenic Byway (featuring Brownell, an almost-ghost town)

Previous My Mississippi Manifest Destiny posts:

The Natchez Trace Part Three
The Natchez Trace Part Two, Indian Mounds
The Natchez Trace Part One
$aving$ in Tupelo
Where Elvis bought his first guitar
Elvis Presley's birthplace
The Battle of Tupelo
Corinth
Shiloh Part Four
Shiloh Part Three
Shiloh Part Two
Shiloh Part One
Carl Perkins
The Varsity Theatre in Martin, Tennessee
Lincoln and Kentucky
Metropolis

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