Higdon Road, Mississippi
Cemetery in Higdon, Mississippi
Monday morning I rode across the southwest Tennessee and to Holly Springs, Mississippi. I turned off Route 4 onto Higdon Road just east of Holly Springs and located the spot where MapQuest said Higdon should be. I was on Higdon Road, but I couldn't find a place that I could identify as Higdon.
I started asking if anyone named Higdon lived around there. Everybody I talked to seemed to know where a Higdon lived, but sometimes the directions weren't clear to me. Eventually, I found Bessie Hasbrouck, who was previously married to a Higdon.
She told me the original Higdon property was quite large, but like the others it had been broken up over the years. There had once been a Higdon Grocery Store. After the store closed the building was reopened as a speakeasy, or bar, which Bessie operated. She told me several Higdons were buried behind one of the local churches.
I found the church (Free Branch Missionary Baptist, I think; I didn't take enough notes) and hiked the path through the woods to the cemetery. I snapped a picture of a marker of a civil war era Higdon. The camera's flash washed out part of the name, but I think it is J. L. V. Higdon, and it's clear that he was in Company H of the 44th Mississippi Infantry.
I stopped long enough to take a picture of the Higdon Road sign after I left the cemetery. Bessie also suggested I talk to Joe Harold Higdon for more information, but I couldn't locate his house before I had to leave for my next overnight stop.
This time I paid more attention to the state park symbols on my map! I would be traveling toward Alabama on US Highway 72, and I located two state parks just inside the Mississippi state line. J. P. Coleman State Park is a few miles north of the highway and Tishomingo State Park is a few miles south. I figured I had two chances of finding a suitable tent camping area. The first one I tried, Tishomingo, was quite nice, and that's where I set up my tent.