page_title: Duck Hill, Mississippi
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Duck Hill, Mississippi / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Illinois Central Depot, Duck Hill, Mississippi, c.1910
context_page_description: Duck Hill is a town in Montgomery County, Mississippi, United States. The population was 732 at the 2010 census.
  Duck Hill is located on U.S. Route 51, midway between Grenada and Winona. Big Bogue Creek flows east of the town.
  The Lucie E. Campbell Gospel and Heritage Festival takes place each July in Duck Hill.
context_section_description: Duck Hill is named for a large hill northeast of the town, where "Duck", a Choctaw chief, held war councils.  Chief Duck was also a medicine man or shaman who treated his people. A statue of Chief Duck is located on U.S. Route 51 in Duck Hill, next to an old Illinois Central caboose.
  The first European-American settler in the area was John A. Binford in 1834, who acquired land following Indian Removal of the Choctaw, who were forced to cede their lands to the United States. He built the first home in the area, and developed his property as a cotton plantation, based on enslaved African-American workers. He became one of the region's most successful planters and large slaveholders. Binford was elected to the Mississippi Legislature. Duck Hill was a trading center for the cotton planters.
  In 1856 the Illinois Central Railroad completed a line from Chicago to New Orleans, and it built a depot at Duck Hill. This stimulated its businesses.  The line is now used for freight operation by the Grenada Railway.
  A train wreck occurred at Duck Hill on October 19, 1862, when in the early morning hours two trains collided head-on, killing 34 men. Most of the dead were Confederate soldiers. It was the South's worst loss of life in a train accident to that time.
  During the Civil War, Binford's sons, James R. and John A. Jr., helped lead the Confederate "Company E" from Duck Hill, known as the "McClung Rifles". James R. Binford later was elected to the Mississippi State Senate. After white Democrats regained control of the state legislature following the Reconstruction era, he wrote the notorious Jim Crow laws for Mississippi.
  In 1887, regional businessmen hoped that Duck Hill would become a thriving mill town after iron ore was found nearby.  Financial speculation followed.  Tour of our Southern Correspondent reported in The New York Times:
  Duck Hill is the euphonious appellation of a straggling wee bit of a hamlet down in the depths of Mississippi, a dozen miles or so from Grenada, on the Illinois Central Railroad, known to the world and to history in something less than a wholesale way.
  Duck Hill was the site of a railroad robbery in 1888.  Two armed men, Rube Burrow and Joe Jackson, clung to the outside of a train as it left the station, then climbed to the engine cab. They ordered the engineer to stop the train about a mile north of town.  The robbers plundered the express car's safe of $3000, killing one man who tried to intervene.
caption: Illinois Central Depot in Duck Hill, c. 1910
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