Durant, MS

Durant is an eastern Holmes County city on the west side of the Big Black River valley, with U.S. 51 running through the center. It began in 1858 as a Mississippi Central Railroad station and took its name from Louis Durant, a Choctaw chief who lived on the site before Indian Removal displaced him and most of the Choctaw to Indian Territory. The 2020 census counted 2,231 residents. That history gives the town’s name a deeper meaning than a railroad sign alone.

Holmes County State Park sits four miles south of town, built around English and Odom lakes with cabins, camping, fishing, trails, and the surviving Civilian Conservation Corps landscape. Three miles west, the Castalian Springs Hotel preserves a rare Mississippi mineral-springs-era building. Durant’s schoolchildren now fall within Holmes County Consolidated School District, with Durant Elementary in town and Holmes County Central High near Lexington. The town also remembers Hazel Brannon Smith, the Durant News editor whose civil-rights writing earned a Pulitzer Prize. Roads, lakes, historic buildings, and school buses keep the city tied to the wider county.