Jackson Homes Guide

History

Jackson, Mississippi was originally the home to the Choctaw, Natchez, and Chickasaw Native America Indian tribes. When Louis LeFleur, a French-Canadian trapper, set up a trading post in the area in the late 1700’s, it became known as LeFleur’s Bluff. The Mississippi State Legislature had originally named the state capital as Natchez, later moved it to Washington, but then saw the need for a centrally located capital city and so a survey team was sent to the area. After surveying both the northern and eastern sides of the state, Thomas Hinds, James Patton, and William Lattimore reported that the area of LeFleur’s Bluff was beautiful and healthy, had good water, abundant timber, navigable waters, and was close to the Natchez Trace.

On November 28, 1821 it became the capital city and was renamed Jackson, after the famous Major General Andrew Jackson, who was the hero of the Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812 and would become the seventh president of the United States. A special layout for the city was proposed by the nations third president, Thomas Jefferson, where the city was in a ‘checkerboard’ shape and alternating city blocks were in the form of parks. The main arrangement is still intact downtown, but most of the grassy park area has been removed.

Jackson has been a city of many firsts, and in 1839 was the site of the passing of the first state law allowing married women to own their own property. 1840 saw Jackson connected to other cities by railroad, which would later spark the growth of the city due to the American Civil War, making it a main supply line for the Confederate Army in the south. In 1846, the famous Jackson City Hall was built, which is still standing today.

Jackson’s history would be forever changed during the American Civil War. In January, 1861, the Mississippi State Legislature, located in Jackson, made the decision for the state to secede from the Union. In 1863, the Union forces captured Jackson, winning the first Battle of Jackson and sending the Confederate troops north. Day’s later Union troops burned and looted the prime economic facilities in Jackson during the infamous “Sherman’s March” under the direction of the well remembered General William Tecumseh Sherman. The only building spared from this horrific event was Jackson City Hall. There is a rumor that General Sherman bypassed the city hall because it housed a Masonic Lodge and he was a Mason. Another story says that it was used as a hospital, this probably being the reason it was not burned.

Union troops moved on to Vicksburg and the Confederate troops regrouped in Jackson. In July of 1863, the Siege of Jackson began and within a week Union troops burned the city for the second time. From this the city earned its nickname “Chimneyville,” a tribute to the few things that were left standing after the war. By 1865, at the end of the Civil War, Mississippi’s agricultural economy was ruined, infrastructure was completely destroyed, and the look at recovery was not a good one. Almost all hope was gone for the south, but they persevered. Recovery was, indeed, extremely slow but Jackson finally began to regain a little of what it had lost by the late 1880’s.

It was at this time that Jim Crow laws began to surface causing extreme racism that would end up haunting Jackson, as well as Mississippi as a whole, for years and years to come. The blacks living in the city were restricted to segregated neighborhoods, the largest of which was the Farish Street District.

Jackson’s population at the turn of the century was very small, less than 8,000 in fact. However, the number of people in the city began growing rapidly in the early 1900’s. Jackson’s economy began to grow immensely in the 1930’s due to the discovery of natural gas fields located nearby. The thirties also saw a cultural scene emerge in the Farish Street District, with places like the Crystal Palace Night Club and the Alamo Theater hosting names such as Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Lionel Hampton.

Jackson was one of the main sites of the American civil rights movement during the 1960’s. Civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., Stokely Carmichael, and Medgar Evers made appearances and staged demonstrations to protest activities in churches, restaurants, and homes in Jackson and the surrounding areas. In May, 1961, a large group of Freedom Riders were arrested in Jackson, making national headlines. Jackson was also the site of a famous sit-in by Anne Moody (local Jacksonian), John Salter and Joan Trunpauer at a local Woolworth’s lunch counter in May 1963.

There were many other sit-ins staged in Jackson as well putting the city at the height of racial unrest. Then in June of 1963 Medgar Evers, the field secretary of the Mississippi NAACP, was murdered by white supremacist, Byron de la Beckwith in the driveway of his home. Beckwith was tried twice and was found innocent both times by a completely white jury, but was finally convicted for the murder in 1994.

The state of Mississippi and the city of Jackson have come a long way in the last thirty years. They have obviously overcome many of their racial problems as Jackson elected its first African American mayor in 1997. They are a city on the rise, in the process of shaking off the ghosts of the past and looking towards a new and bright future.