Monroe Mission, south of Pontotoc, was a Presbyterian mission and farm school among the Chickasaw in their Mississippi homeland, begun in 1821 and named for President James Monroe. The Reverend Thomas C. Stuart, sent by the Synod of South Carolina and Georgia, reached the site with a party of mission families in late January 1821, and that month the workers felled the first tree. The National Park Service's marker dates the Chickasaws' first Christian teaching and schooling there to 1822; five years later 100 acres were under cultivation and 81 pupils were attending the school, the boys learning farming and carpentry and the girls spinning and weaving alongside their lessons.
More than 150 people were baptized in a church that the marker describes as a room not over sixteen feet square, with a large brush-covered arbor in front for summer meetings. So many Chickasaw families sent children that the school ran out of room, and a second was opened two miles north. The Chickasaw Nation, which saw schooling as essential in its dealings with the United States, also paid for three schools of its own, at Tokshish, Martyn and Caney Creek. The Park Service counts Monroe and the other stations as the training ground of many who became leaders of the Chickasaw in Oklahoma after removal. A congregation carried on at Monroe after the Chickasaw left, and the present Old Monroe church building dates from 1870. The site lies about 15 kilometres west of the Natchez Trace Parkway, which marks it with an exhibit at milepost 245.6.
Getting there
34.1623, -89.0117
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