Photos of Abbeville

Named for a town in South Carolina, where many of Lafayette's original white settlers were from, the hamlet of Abbeville grew up in the antebellum era at the center of the plantations that were established on the rich soil between Oxford and the Tallahatchie River. It was a stop on the railroad that came through the county in the 1850s, and the site of a Union Army camp during the Civil War. By 1950 its population was 275, including a number of African Americans who may have been descended from slaves on those plantations.