Appaloosa Horses for Sale near Durant, MS

About Durant, MS

Before the Civil War, this was known as the "dark corner of the county." Cotton plantations were developed along the waterfronts to take advantage of the fertile soil. They were dependent on the labor of numerous black slaves, and the county population was majority black and enslaved. About 1935 Hazel Brannon Smith, a recent college graduate from Gadsden, Alabama, bought the local weekly newspaper, the Durant News, which had been failing. Over the next several years, she turned it around, and served as its editor and publisher into the early 1970s. In the 1950s she also acquired the Lexington Advertiser, and later two other small papers.