Cowles Mead Cemetery, at milepost 88.1 of the Natchez Trace Parkway near Clinton, holds the grave of the acting governor who took Aaron Burr into custody. Mead, pronounced Coals, was born in Virginia in 1776 and went to Congress from Georgia after the election of 1804, certified by 169 votes with three hurricane-delayed counties uncounted; a recount in November 1805 gave the seat to Thomas Spalding by 39. On January 20, 1806, Thomas Jefferson appointed Mead secretary of the Mississippi Territory. Governor Robert Williams was away in North Carolina when Burr, the former vice president, landed at Bruinsburg on January 10, 1807, and Mead, as acting governor, called out the militia, secured Burr's surrender and jailed his suspected helpers.
Mead's quarrels with Williams cost him the secretary's post, but he kept winning seats in the territorial assembly. In 1817 he proposed naming the new state Washington and lost the vote 23 to 17. He became Speaker of the Mississippi House in 1823, and in 1825 he ran for governor and lost to David Holmes, 1,499 votes to 7,846. Meadville, the seat of Franklin County, is named for him.
In the late 1820s he moved to Clinton, known until 1828 as Mount Salus, where Hampstead Academy, now Mississippi College, had been founded in 1826; he joined its trustees in 1833 and became board president in 1842. His plantation, Greenwood, stood in a lawn of fifty acres of Bermuda grass, which the Park Service says he is believed to have introduced to the United States. He died in 1844 and was buried on the estate. The house burned in 1863.
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32.3506, -90.3401
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