Liberty, Mississippi
Town
Amite County Courthouse in Liberty
Amite County Courthouse in Liberty
Location of Liberty, Mississippi
Location of Liberty, Mississippi
Liberty, Mississippi is located in the United States
Liberty, Mississippi
Liberty, Mississippi
Location in the United States
Coordinates: 31°9′39″N 90°48′14″W / 31.16083°N 90.80389°W / 31.16083; -90.80389
CountryUnited States
StateMississippi
CountyAmite
Government
 • MayorPat Talbert
Area
[1]
 • Total2.06 sq mi (5.34 km2)
 • Land2.06 sq mi (5.34 km2)
 • Water0.00 sq mi (0.00 km2)
Elevation
338 ft (103 m)
Population
 (2020)
 • Total560
 • Density271.71/sq mi (104.90/km2)
Time zoneUTC-6 (Central (CST))
 • Summer (DST)UTC-5 (CDT)
ZIP code
39645
Area code601
FIPS code28-40640
GNIS feature ID0672435
Websitewww.amitecounty.ms/liberty

Liberty is a town in Amite County, Mississippi. It is part of the McComb, Mississippi micropolitan statistical area. It is the county seat of Amite County.[2]

The town can be accessed via I-55, then west on Mississippi Highway 24. McGehee Air Park is located about a mile west of town.

Liberty celebrates its Heritage Days Festival during the first weekend of each May.

Air Cruisers manufacturing plant is located in Liberty. Owned by Zodiac Aerospace, the plant produces evacuation slides, life rafts, and life vests for the aviation industry.

Eleven sites in or near Liberty are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

History

Erected in 1871, the Confederate Monument in Liberty was the first in Mississippi.[3]

Liberty was incorporated on February 24, 1809. The Amite County Courthouse in Liberty is the oldest in Mississippi. Erected in 1839, the courthouse was enlarged and modernized in 1936.[4] It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The Amite Female Seminary (also known as the 'Little Red Schoolhouse'), built in 1853, was a girls finishing school located in Liberty. During the American Civil War, in the spring of 1863, Federal troops under the command of Colonel Benjamin Grierson, a former music teacher, burned the school, but spared the school's music building. The Federal commander permitted musical instruments to be removed, and was prepared to give the order to torch the building, when he recognized the music school's director, Rev. Milton Shirk, as a former classmate from New York. The two-story, two-room music building survives to this day on Mississippi Highway 569, and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.[5]

Gail Borden, who developed a process in the early 1850s for condensing milk and founded the New York Condensed Milk Company (later known as Borden Inc., lived in Liberty from 1822 to 1829.

Between 1904 and 1921, a branch of the Liberty–White Railroad, a narrow-gauge logging rail line serving the White Lumber Company, ran between McComb, Mississippi and Liberty.[6]

During the Civil Rights Movement, in September 1961, Herbert Lee, an African-American dairy farmer and member of NAACP, was murdered in Liberty at the Westbrook Cotton Gin by E.H. Hurst, a white state legislator. Lee had attended voter registration classes and volunteered to try to register to vote, Witnesses to the killing were intimidated by armed white men in the courtroom to support Hurst's claim of self-defense, and he was released without charges. Louis Allen, a married African-American landowner with a logging business, reported the truth about the crime to federal officials while seeking protection for testimony. He did not get protection. He suffered economic blackmail, arrests and harassment, and was killed in January 1964.

Liberty was the location of the fourth-wettest tropical cyclone in Mississippi in 2001; Tropical Storm Allison dropped 18.95 inches (481 mm) of precipitation.

Liberty, Texas is thought to have been named after this town, as numerous families from Amite County moved west in the 1820s to settle in the Atascosito district north-east of Houston.[7]

Geography

According to the United States Census Bureau, the town covers an area of 2.0 square miles (5.3 km2), of which 0.00077 square miles (0.002 km2), or 0.03%, is water.[8]

Demographics

Historical population
CensusPop.Note%±
1900392—
191055641.8%
1920515−7.4%
19305517.0%
194066520.7%
19506832.7%
1960642−6.0%
1970612−4.7%
19806699.3%
1990624−6.7%
20006331.4%
201072815.0%
2020560−23.1%
U.S. Decennial Census[9]
Liberty racial composition as of 2020[10]
Race Num. Perc.
White (non-Hispanic) 403 71.96%
Black or African American (non-Hispanic) 122 21.79%
Other/Mixed 21 3.75%
Hispanic or Latino 14 2.5%

As of the 2020 United States census, there were 560 people, 282 households, and 184 families residing in the town.

Education

The town of Liberty is served by the Amite County School District. Liberty is also the home of Amite School Center, a K-12 education institution that is a member of the Mississippi Association of Independent Schools. The town manages a state property named the Ethel Stratton Vance Natural Area, just west of town, which is often used for educational purposes and is home to sports fields, camping areas, a large equestrian center, and over 200 acres of biologically diverse ravines, beaver impoundments, and bottomland hardwood forest along the West Fork Amite River.[11]

Notable people

References

  1. ↑ "2020 U.S. Gazetteer Files". United States Census Bureau. Retrieved July 24, 2022.
  2. ↑ "Find a County". National Association of Counties. Archived from the original on May 31, 2011. Retrieved June 7, 2011.
  3. ↑ Taylor, Dawn (August 31, 2014). "Confederate Monument, Liberty, MS". The Battle of Liberty, MS. Archived from the original on February 17, 2017. Retrieved February 16, 2017.
  4. ↑ "Amite Repairs Court House". Woodville Republican. May 2, 1936.
  5. ↑ "National Register of Historic Places Inventory Nomination Form" (PDF). U.S. Dept. of the Interior. 1980.
  6. ↑ McElvaine, Robert S. (1988). Mississippi: The WPA Guide to the Magnolia State. University Press of Mississippi. ISBN 9781604732894.
  7. ↑ Schaadt, Robert L. (July 13, 2011). "Texas History ~ Founders of Liberty: Hugh Blair Johnston". The Vindicator.
  8. ↑ "Geographic Identifiers: 2010 Demographic Profile Data (G001): Liberty town, Mississippi". U.S. Census Bureau, American Factfinder. Archived from the original on February 12, 2020. Retrieved June 19, 2013.
  9. ↑ "Census of Population and Housing". Census.gov. Retrieved June 4, 2015.
  10. ↑ "Census of Population and Housing, 2000 [United States]: Race and Hispanic or Latino Summary File". ICPSR Data Holdings. January 22, 2008. doi:10.3886/icpsr13575. Retrieved December 17, 2021.
  11. ↑ "Ethel Stratton Vance Natural Area". Amite County, Mississippi. Retrieved March 17, 2018.
  12. ↑ "T.F. Badon, a Server and Friend Dies at 92" (PDF). The Southern Herald. May 28, 2015. pp. 1, 8. Archived (PDF) from the original on January 12, 2020. Retrieved May 18, 2020.
  13. ↑ "James Brown". ESPN. Retrieved May 18, 2020.
  14. ↑ Obituary of Clyde V. Ratcliff Sr., Tensas Gazette, October 8, 1952.
  15. ↑ Lee, Ching (August 18, 2004). "Legendary Mid-Valley blues man dies at 82 - Appeal-Democrat: Home". Appeal-Democrat.com. Retrieved October 27, 2016.
  16. ↑ Huff, Robert Glen; Nunnery, Hattie Pearl (2009). Amite County & Liberty, Mississippi: Celebrating 200 Years. Virginia Beach, VA: Donning Company Publishers. ISBN 978-1-57864-547-3.
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