The Kosciusko Welcome Center, at milepost 160 of the Natchez Trace Parkway, is named for Tadeusz Kościuszko, the Polish military engineer who fought for the Continental Army in the American Revolution, and it keeps a life-size likeness of him. The town it serves grew from a spring on the Natchez Trace known as Redbud Springs. Attala County was created on December 23, 1833, from land the Choctaw ceded in the 1830 Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, and William Dodd, its first representative in the legislature, named the county seat for Kościuszko. The Park Service calls Kosciusko the only city in the United States named in his honor.
Local accounts say Dodd, a surveyor, chose the name out of his grandfather's admiration for the general, that Paris was also proposed, and that the town settled on an Americanized spelling and pronunciation. The county's own name came from fiction: Attala honors Atala, the Indian heroine of François-René de Chateaubriand's 1801 novel set among the Natchez. A 1950 state marker says Kosciusko was chartered in 1836 and that its trade earned it the title Beehive of the Hills.
Kościuszko came to America in 1776, designed fortifications for the Continental Army, among them the works at West Point, and was promoted to brigadier general by Congress in 1783. In 1798 he wrote a will leaving his American assets to buy the freedom of enslaved people and educate them; it was never carried out. James Meredith, who in 1962 became the first African American student at the University of Mississippi, was born in Kosciusko in 1933.
Getting there
33.0375, -89.5786
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