Jefferson College at Washington is where the Mississippi Territory tried, and failed, to hold Aaron Burr. On February 4, 1807, Burr, the former vice president, was brought before the territorial court in a building that stood near the giant oaks of the campus, which the college's 1970 National Register nomination recorded as still standing. He had come down the Mississippi with a small party of armed men, suspected of plotting to carve a new country out of the western territories or to seize Spanish land, and had surrendered at Bayou Pierre, about 30 miles north of Natchez. The grand jury at Washington refused to indict him, but he was not released, and Burr slipped away into the wilderness. He was recaptured on February 19, 1807, and taken to Virginia to stand trial. Washington, six miles east of Natchez, had been the territorial capital since 1802.
The territorial legislature chartered Jefferson College on May 13, 1802, its first act of incorporation, though money and arguments over the site kept the doors shut until January 1811. In the summer of 1817 the convention that wrote Mississippi's first constitution met in a brick Methodist meeting house, built in 1812, on the south side of the campus. The college claimed the building in 1830, and a tornado destroyed it in 1873; recent fieldwork has uncovered a brick foundation that may be its remains.
A ten-year-old Jefferson Davis was among the college's early students. It closed as Jefferson Military College in 1964, and the campus now belongs to the Mississippi Department of Archives and History.
Getting there
31.5811, -91.3003
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