History :

The old town of Walnut Grove, Mississippi developed on a frontier, created in Central Mississippi for white settlers in the 1830's. The Choctaw removal from Mississippi to Indian Territory west of the Mississippi River, after the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, opened the frontier.

New land for cotton production, land never before cleared of timber for farm use, was the reason for the Indian removal and for the opening of the frontier. The frontier attracted white settlers who bought land. Some of the planter class, bought large acreage and established plantations, but most of the land went to the yeoman farmer type settler who set up family operated farms. With family labor the yeoman farmer cleared the land, planted, produced and sold cotton for a profit far greater than he had ever before experienced or had ever thought or even imagined possible from a farm crop. Settlers lived on the frontier in community with other settlers and towns and villages developed.

In 1925, lumber supplanted cotton as the primary money maker for residents of the area. Almost a century had past since the first settlers arrived on the frontier and the old town of Walnut Grove had developed from a settler community to be an incorporated town. The lumber industry, supporting a new economy, built a new town of Walnut Grove.