Hernando-Olive Branch-Nesbit-Southaven

People from all over the nation came to be pronounced man and wife here.  Before he was a millionaire and Civil War legend, coroner Nathan Bedford Forrest pronounced people dead here.  Here, John Grisham wrote his first best-selling prose, and at the turn of the century a thriving community of musical talents arose, artists who migrated to Memphis when they weren’t playing minstrel or medicine shows.

Elvis and Priscilla honeymooned here.  Hernando DeSoto traveled through here and left two of his names behind.  Today, at the top of Mississippi, the golf courses are greener, the blues are bluesier, still spawning successful musical artists after more than a century.  And where DeSoto once explored, you’ll discover great territory for leisure and recreation, at the gateway to Memphis, and a high point of hospitality.

Dual passports.  When babies are born in this easy-going portion of the Mississippi Hills that’s what they are in effect issued, because for the rest of their lives, they’ll live with one foot in Mississippi and one foot in Memphis.

Sound like a tough balancing act?  Not for the folks around here.  In fact, people from all walks of life have found this unique location to their advantage—whether it was a 20-year-old Nathan Bedford Forrest beginning in business in Hernando with his uncle before he went on to greater fortune in Memphis, or whether it was DeSoto County proto-blues greats like Mississippi Joe Callicot, Garfield Akers, Frank Stokes and Elijah Avery plying their talents in Beale Street clubs and recording studios (and even earlier, busking on Memphis streets), or whether it was Southaven resident John Grisham using Memphis as the evocative backdrop for his first smash thriller.

The explorer Hernando DeSoto came through this area on his way to the Mississippi in 1540, and some three hundred years later, residents chose to honor the explorer by naming both the new county DeSoto and the new county seat Hernando.  In 1845, a young Nathan Bedford Forrest, who had come to Hernando to go into business with his uncle, was also elected Hernando’s constable and coroner.  And though he moved on to Memphis, Forrest’s political bent was established; he became a Memphis alderman in 1858, and after the Civil War returned to the city to a controversial political profile.

While Forrest would remained enmeshed in racial divisiveness, in DeSoto County the war was over at Appomattox.  By 1872 DeSoto County’s first free school for African Americans had been formed, and by the turn of the century Hernando and the DeSoto area had become home for a community of great African-American guitarists who would lay down the tracks for a great new art called the blues.