What’s the point of all the little tiny names in between?

Hot Coffee and D'Lo represent

Sometimes it's because a large number of the same family live nearby, 'insert last name' -ville or -town. Sometimes a community will take its name from a church that's been there a long time.

Some of these communities are actually ghost towns. I live in one off the Tombigbee River. It was once the largest town in the county and had a busy port and a post office and business offices. When the railroad came through, the river traffic lessened, and the town died back to a farming community. We kept the name.

Edit: I have several friends who live in Eggville. I consider it more Mooreville than Tupelo.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggville,_Mississippi

In Pearl River County we have a Hawthorne off HWY 11 apparently which is news to me considering I lived there 22 years

MDAH has this interactive map for historic site inventory and if you zoom in, right before you get to the satellite view, it has this absolutely stunning topographical/political map of MS. I’ve been curious to see a full version ever since I encountered this site a couple months ago. It’s at least ten years outdated, granted, evidenced by Picayune’s Crosby hospital still being on there, but looking at that map in particular really gives you a sense of how many teeny-tiny communities there are potentially upwards of two centuries old and lost to time.

Very clear warning: you may waste copious amounts of time viewing this map lol but hey. Best viewed on PC!

I found the origins of a couple just out of curiosity. —A lot are as expected local landowners and homesteaders especially in north MS but

—Some are named for churches, not the other way around. We had a lot of southern Baptist settlers in the 1830s/40s especially in central MS so I suspect they were congregation names they carried here from commonly the Carolinas, Virginia, and Kentucky. I researched one during an internship at the state archives one time where one extended family of like fifty people and their slaves settled in chocktaw county and the goal was establishing a town. First thing up? The church!

—A lot are gonna be railroad stops, usually named after the local stop operator. And of course in the piney woods that’s gonna be a lot of lumber cars, I haven’t really spent much time looking on the coast or in the delta to see if there’s a lot of quirky differences. Of course now that the railroad has lost prominence most of these will be obsolete.

—Some are the remnants of old Native American trading posts, like Franklin or Paulding. Fun fact the area around where PRC and Hancock Counties meet was a huge Native road network for lots of groups so a lot of their settlements in that area specifically just kind of stuck and became those unincorporated areas

—A lot are just post offices! Frontiersman had to get their mail somehow so a lot of post offices were erected at crossroads and since they often doubled as general stores, as you can imagine towns sprung up around them. Sometimes they didn’t! But most of what you see recorded will be the site or former site of a post office. There’s more than one town in MS where the post office is the single oldest building anywhere around

Now, names of course, a whole different story. But that’s why a lot of the communities are where they are, among other reasons!

Attala County repping here. There are a lot of ghost towns and church communities. Edgefield is a neat little place. There’s this massive cemetery out there and like all of five people who go to that church, and there’s not exactly a large population in the surrounding area.

From what I’ve seen, these places each have a distinct culture or attitude, more or less how you have high school cliques—football players, cheerleaders, band kids, etc. I lived in a “nicer” neighborhood in Greenville at one point before moving out to Swiftwater (south of town). I’ve spent a lot of time in Sunrise (Leake County), Thompson (Amite County, I think), and more recently Hesterville (Attala). We have a Possum Neck, and I’d REALLY love to know the story behind that name!

You find that each community has a distinctive culture and attitude. And believe me, you need to date outside your community or even your county because most people belong to the same 4 or 5 big families out there. If you literally date the boy or girl next door, chances are he or she is a distant cousin. And yes, I speak from experience on that one. I met a Delta girl in college. It was about the only option I had for bringing in fresh blood! 🤣🤣🤣

Barrontown represent!

In Petal, MS

Because once upon a time this state had a helluva lot more people in it, and they lived in all those tiny communities, which weren't so tiny in those days. You talk about the Tupelo area, so you know Okolona. It's almost a ghost town these days. I've seen 100 year old photos from Okolona that show the people on the street so thick there was hardly room to walk, and that was just an ordinary shopping day. According to the markers on the Natchez Trace, the state had TWICE as many people as it does today IN THE STONE AGE, and that was before the settlers arrived. Before modern agriculture you had tiny farm settlements everywhere. Where nowadays you have pine plantations there used to be miles of farmhouses one after another. Now nothing is left but dirt roads cutting through the pines and the occasional farmhouse turned into a "hunting cabin".

Don’t forget Eastabuchie! Or the nearby forgotten “Dragon, MS”

Show me on the doll where Guntown hurt you.

Red Hills near Janice. Nothing left but a cemetery in the woods.

Haven’t been down that part of Hwy 51 in awhile, but does It, Mississippi still have a sign that says “This is It”?

https://www.usgs.gov/us-board-on-geographic-names/domestic-names

I did check, Eggville is in there.

I love having friends from other states come in to visit. I took them around where I grew up just to show them some of the country side. When I told them we were coming up on Bloody Springs, their heads snapped around.

Ask the Czar of Lost Rabbit. I met the mayor of Pocahontas once. I told him I was from tchoupitoulas and he said "god bless you"

And there’s Pineville, Soso, Sullivan’s Hollow, Center Ridge, Money, New Holka (not to be confconfused with Hoka), Kokomo, Shuqualak, Midnight, Beaumont and Buckatunna.

Many of these small communities had a post office at one time before Rural Free Delivery (RFD) and were named by the postmaster there.

They're hollers. Family communities with gas stations and churches. Some of them are abandoned plantations that got divied up by descendants. Others are former logging camps.

I drive through Africa Town in Mobile area when I drive to MS.

Pistache here :)

Anywhere you go has names like this for little districts . Maybe historically there were a bunch of chicken coop there. But now they're gone so the name seems random.

Whynot?

I live in Altair [where there's a church] which is just west of Eucutta [which has a VFD] which is northeast of Whistler [which has a sign on highwy 84] which is in Beat Four [the section of Wayne County we live in, where there's a ton of little communities].

...and my mail comes from Shubuta, but 1 mile down the road south is Laurel zipcoded and one mile east of me is Waynesboro zipcoded.

In the Delta there's Hushpuckena, Nitta Yuma, Itta Bena, Alligator, Gunnison and Beulah.

Chiming in for China Lee, Hooker, Arm, Stump Town!

Address names are decided based on the closest post office. Sometimes you van live in a smaller city but if it doesnt have a post office, your address uses the closest post office. For example, people living on gluckstadt use the canton address because gluckstadt doesnt have a post office. Also, you could live outside a city or way out in the countryside, but you still get the address of the closest post office.

Weir is 10 miles east of West.

I live in Dragon, close to sunrise, and Harvey

Because they used to be their own towns and then they got incorporated by a surrounding town that was bigger/growing but are still called by their original names. Usually the town became irrelevant for loss of a factory, railroad, timber industry or whatever. It's no different than going into a big city that has specific names for neighborhoods.

I live in Gulfport but also in whatever is left of a community called Handsboro, and I drive through an old community called Mississippi City to get to work. I've done a little digging and found old stories about how people moved to Handsboro with Gulfport got too crowded in the late 1800s and how it was a day's carriage ride away.

I think your at least 100 years too late to start naming stuff.

I used to work overseas. What’s hilarious to me is all the people both US and foreign that can’t pronounce all the Am Indian names.

Not sure how many towns you're asking about are listed, but here's volume one of an old book of Mississippi history. Volume two is also online. 

https://archive.org/details/EncyclopediaOfMississippiHistoryVolume1

I lived in Olive Branch, Mississippi as a child and actually had this as a history lesson!!

They needed to name the town and the wife of the leader suggested something Biblical and maybe from Genesis and they all settled on “Olive Branch” from the Noah myth.

Like a promising sign or something.

Also lived in Disputanta, Virginia, which was named that because there was a “dispute” about what the town should be named. It is on a main rail line and folks needed a freakin name and that one caught on. Oh, and fun fact—the second “t” is silent (dis-pun-tan-a).

Another bonus question: What food is in these little communities, if any. And what is famous in the community?

I will start: Sylvarena has a BBQ hamburger gas station/bait shop, formerly owned by Jerry Lawler

Sanatorium had the TB hospital in the 20's, and 30's. Patients from all over MS

Bogue Chitto, MS (the Bogue Chitto River flows through it) is an unincorporated Hamlet. The name is Choctaw for "Big Creek" if memory serves me well.

There is an even smaller area near by called Hog Chain. I was told by old timers when I was growing up that there was a pig farmer that would chain his pigs to the elevated railroad when the river would flood so his livestock wouldn't drown. I don't know of any official signage but there is definitely a Hog Chain Rd and my mother lived in Hog Chain as a child...she is 75 now.