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Located fourteen miles northeast of Tupelo, at the intersection of Mississippi Highway 363 and Mississippi Highway 371, the town of Mantachie, Mississippi is in Itawamba County. Nearby communities include Dorsey, Eggville, Fulton, Mooreville, and Shiloh. Tupelo, Mississippi is about sixteen miles to the southwest. The town grew around a crossroads store that was established by Woods Pearce, not far from the largest Chickasaw village in northeastern Mississippi, and was named for the Chickasaw Chief Man-ta-chee, who was killed in a fight with another Chickasaw. When the Treaty of Pontotoc Creek was signed in 1832, most of the Chickasaws left their village and European-Americans moved in, although several whites had already settled the area. The Mantachie Cemetery on Baptist Church Hill overlooks the Mantachie Creek bottom lands where the monuments of the Chickasaw have been for hundreds of years, seen in the form of burial mounds. The early white settlers of Mantachie and Itawamba County came mostly from the hill regions of Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina and Tennessee, where slavery was not dominant, so they came with very few slaves. Although legal in Mississippi, slavery was not popular in Itawamba County, largely because the land was not suitable for large plantations. By the time of the Civil War, however, there were a few medium-sized plantations in the county, with from ten to forty slaves. Sentiment was largely pro-Confederate, although there were pro-Union activities.

 

 

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