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Pelahatchie, Mississippi is a small town in Rankin County. The town is situated four miles east of the boundary between the Choctaw Cessions of 1820, at Doak’s Stand, and the Dancing Rabbit Creek Treaty of 1830, where the Choctaw people were forced to cede 5,500,000 acres of land to the United States government, opening the door for white settlers to move into this part of Mississippi. White settlers came mostly from Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, and the Carolinas. In the 1850s, settlers from the Carolinas established a community at the site of an old Indian village, forming the town that became Pelahatchie, a Choctaw word that means “crooked creek,” for the winding nature of the creek that went through the area. The Alabama and Vicksburg Railroad came through the town in 1858, and Pelahatchie was formally laid out in 1860. The new town narrowly escaped destruction by Union General Sherman after the fall of Vicksburg, when Sherman followed the Old Stage Road east of Brandon rather than following the railroad, which would have brought him through Pelahatchie. A post office was opened in 1868, and the town’s first school was established in the early 1870s. Pelahatchie was incorporated in 1904. Pelahatchie is on the western edge of the Roosevelt State Park and the Bienville National Forest. Nearby communities include Brandon, Cooperville, Guide, Independence, Langford, Leesburg, Morton, Polkville, Pulaski, Rufus, Shiloh, and Stage. The state capital of Jackson is twenty-seven miles west of Pelahatchie.

 

 

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