PONTOTOC COUNTY
Chapter XLIV, pages 813-814
Pontotoc is one of the twelve large counties
created February 9, 1836, out of the Chickasaw cession of 1832, and is
situated in the northeastern part of the State. It originally embraced
parts of the present counties of Lee and Union. In 1866, it contributed
from its eastern territory several townships to assist in forming the county
of Lee, and in 1870 it was shorn of other parts when Union County was organized.
Its area is now 494 square miles. The name pontotoc is an Indian word signifying
“weed prairie,” and was the name of a Chickasaw chief, though historians
give it other meanings.
The present county of Pontotoc is bounded
on the north by Union County, on the east by Lee County, on the south by
Chickasaw and Calhoun counties and on the west by Calhoun and Lafayette
counties. It was in the southeastern part of this county, near the little
creek Chowappa, that the treaty of Ponotoc was concluded, whereby the Chickasaws
relinquished all their remaining lands in the State. In the year 1834,
T.C. McMackin, who had kept a hotel at the original location of the Pontotoc
land office, came into possession of the present site of Pontotoc town.
He laid off the town and was of sufficient influence to move the old town
of Pontotoc to the present site. Emigrants from Virginia, the Carolinas,
Tennessee, north Alabama and Georgia, as well as from the older parts of
Mississippi, rapidly settled the region, attracted by the cheap and fertile
lands of the new cession. It was long regarded as the “garden spot” of
the South by the pioneers seeking homes in the new Southwest. Pontotoc
is the county seat, was incorporated in 1837, and in 1920 had a population
of nearly 1,300. The United States land office was located in that place
and the town was fairly established at an early day. The county seat is
on the Gulf, Mobile & Northern line running from Mobile to Middleton,
Tennessee, and is the center of a thriving trade for a considerable territory.
Other settlements worthy of mention are Ecru, Sherman, Troy and Toccopola.
Pontotoc County has a population (1920)
of 19,962, having increased about 5,000 since 1890. The last census gives
the value of its farm property at $9,820,000 and of its crops at $4,179,000.
Nearly 23,000 acres within the county were cultivated to cotton and produced
a crop in 1919 amounting to more than 9,000 bales. It is a good live stock
country, the raising of mules for the market being especially profitable.
They constituted in 1919 more than a third of the total live stock value,
dairy cattle and horses following in importance as items of county wealth.
