unincorporated community
An unincorporated area is a region that is not governed by a local municipal corporation. Widespread unincorporated communities and areas are a distinguishing feature of the United States and Canada. Most other countries of the world either have ...
Mississippi
Mississippi () is a state in the Southeastern region of the United States, bordered to the north by Tennessee; to the east by Alabama; to the south by the Gulf of Mexico; to the southwest by Louisiana; and to the northwest by Arkansas. Miss ...
.
Mississippi Highway 17
Mississippi Highway 17 (MS 17) is a state highway in central Mississippi. It runs from north to south for , serving the counties of Madison, a small portion of Yazoo, Holmes, and Carroll.
Route description
MS 17 begins in rural Madison Coun ...
passes through Franklin, which is approximately south of Lexington, the county seat, and approximately north of the town of Pickens.
This was long an area of cotton plantations. In the antebellum era, labor was provided by thousands of enslaved African Americans. After the war, many
freedmen
A freedman or freedwoman is a formerly enslaved person who has been released from slavery, usually by legal means. Historically, enslaved people were freed by manumission (granted freedom by their captor-owners), abolitionism, emancipation (gra ...
continued to work the land as
sharecroppers
Sharecropping is a legal arrangement with regard to agricultural land in which a landowner allows a tenant to use the land in return for a share of the crops produced on that land.
Sharecropping has a long history and there are a wide range ...
and
tenant farmers
A tenant farmer is a person (farmer or farmworker) who resides on land owned by a landlord. Tenant farming is an agricultural production system in which landowners contribute their land and often a measure of operating capital and management, ...
.
History
Franklin was an early place of European-American settlement and developing cotton plantations from the 1830s, when most of the
Choctaw people
The Choctaw (in the Choctaw language, Chahta) are a Native American people originally based in the Southeastern Woodlands, in what is now Alabama and Mississippi. Their Choctaw language is a Western Muskogean language. Today, Choctaw people are ...
Indian Territory
The Indian Territory and the Indian Territories are terms that generally described an evolving land area set aside by the Federal government of the United States, United States Government for the relocation of Native Americans in the United St ...
west of the Mississippi River. The American migrants were mostly from planter families in South Carolina and Virginia, and brought numerous slaves with them. Others they bought through the domestic slave trade to develop their extensive lands for cotton plantations.
Located a short distance east of the settlement is the Franklin Church and Cemetery. Erected in 1841 from labor by enslaved African Americans, the church had two front entrances, one for men and one for women.
On January 2, 1865, during the Civil War, this was a battlefield in an engagement involving 3,300 Federal mounted troops and 1,100
Confederate Home Guard
The Home Guard of the several states of the Confederacy during the American Civil War included all able-bodied white males between the ages of 18 and 50 who were exempt from Confederate service, excepting only the governor and other officials. ...
s led by General
William Wirt Adams
William Wirt Adams (1819–1888) was a banker, planter, state legislator, and a Brigadier General in the Confederate States Army.
Early life
Adams was born in Frankfort, Kentucky, to Anna Weisiger Adams and Judge George Adams (a personal frien ...
. The Union Army won this battle and took numerous prisoners. The Franklin Presbyterian Church is still in use; its congregation has decided to keep the cannonball holes from the Civil War left visible as a reminder of its history.
In 1900 the white population was 80, and the settlement had a post office in the early 1900s.
A post office operated under the name Franklin from 1831 to 1906.