Itta Bena, MS

Itta Bena's name comes from a Choctaw phrase commonly translated as “forest camp,” and the town's first story is tied to Roebuck Lake, an old Yazoo River channel west of Greenwood. Benjamin G. Humphreys established a plantation there in the 1850s, naming the place Itta Bena; later cotton agriculture, the railroad, and trade turned the settlement into a Leflore County center. That origin includes both the region's Indigenous history and the coercive plantation system that shaped the Delta.

Much of the town's built history is gathered in the Itta Bena Historic District, where churches, bank buildings, commercial blocks, houses, and the former railroad setting trace growth from the rail era through the Civil Rights movement. Itta Bena City Park and the city offices on Fitzhugh Street are part of the current civic map, while Mississippi Valley State University sits just northwest in unincorporated Leflore County. The Greenwood micropolitan area supplies the larger service network, but Itta Bena still has its own name, historic core, and relationship to the old water channels of the Delta.