Lauderdale County Tennessee real estate
Lauderdale County website
In November 1835 the Tennessee General Assembly established Lauderdale County from portions of Tipton, Dyer, and Lauderdale Counties. The county was named for Lieutenant Colonel James Lauderdale, who was killed in the battle of New Orleans. The county covers 477 square miles and is bounded by the Forked Deer River, the Mississippi River, and the Hatchie River.
Native Americans used the rich river bottoms and hardwood forests for thousands of years before European explorers arrived. By the late seventeenth century the Chickasaws claimed West Tennessee. Robert Cavelier de La Salle and his party observed their villages, and the Europeans constructed Fort Prudhomme near the mouth of the Hatchie. Despite the Chickasaw claims, North Carolina sent Henry Rutherford to the area in 1785 to survey for land warrants. Following the Jackson Purchase in 1818, Rutherford, his brothers, Benjamin Porter, and a man named Crenshaw settled near Key Corner. Native Americans returned to Lauderdale County during the 1950s, when two Choctaw families migrated to the county to work in the cotton fields. Today two Choctaw communities are in Ripley and Henning.
The earliest settlements of whites and African American slaves were located at Key Corner and Porter's Gap. Griffith Rutherford built the first grist mill in the county at Key Corner in 1826, and Joseph Jordan and William Champers added a cotton gin the following year. Fulton, on the Mississippi River, was settled in 1819, and Judge James Trimble laid out Lauderdale's first town there in 1827. Fulton prospered as a steamboat landing. Durhamville was established in 1829; that same year, a church was built there.
Other early towns included Golddust, Nankipoo, and Hales Point. Nankipoo became the home of Roark Bradford, a popular writer of the 1920s thru 1940s. Bell Irvin Wiley also was raised near Nankipoo and later achieved fame as the author of more than twenty history books on the Civil War including The Life of Billy Yank and The Life of Johnny Reb.
Ripley was established as the county seat in February 1836 and was named for General E. W. Ripley, a veteran of the War of 1812. J. N. Smith opened the first mercantile store in a log cabin, and the town quickly became a center for trade between Dyersburg and Covington. During the antebellum period cotton dominated the county's agriculture. Steamboats carried cotton bales from landings on the Forked Deer, Mississippi, and Hatchie Rivers.
The Civil War devastated the county's farms and plantations. Yet the county recovered from the war slowly, returning to cotton as the primary crop, with some tobacco raised for the market at Memphis. Railroads reached the county in the 1870s. Henning became the first railroad town. Henning's most famous son, Alex Haley, spent his boyhood there with his Palmer grandparents. He later wrote the international bestseller Roots from the stories he heard from his grandmother and aunts.
Today the two largest public sector employers are the Lauderdale County School System and the State of Tennessee's Cold Creek Correctional Facility, formerly Fort Pillow Prison Farm. In 2000 the population of Lauderdale County was 27,101.
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