Editing Ellisville, Mississippi (section)

==History==
The town is named for [[Powhatan Ellis]],<ref>{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=9V1IAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA117 | title=The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States | publisher=Govt. Print. Off. | author=Gannett, Henry | year=1905 | pages=117}}</ref> a former [[U.S. senator]] for Mississippi who identified as a descendant of [[Pocahontas]] and her father, Chief [[Powhatan]] in Virginia. Ellisville was designated as the county seat, and it became the major commercial and population center of Jones County through the early decades of development in the nineteenth century.

During the [[American Civil War|Civil War]], Ellisville and Jones County were a center of pro-[[Union (American Civil War)|Union]] resistance. The county had mostly [[yeomen]] farmers and cattle herders, who were not slaveholders. Slaves constituted 12% of the county's population in 1860, the lowest proportion of slaves of any county in the state in 1860, as conditions generally did not support cultivation of large cotton plantations. Many local men resented going to war to support slaveholders, and worried about the survival of their families, where women and children worked to keep subsistence farms going. They resented [[Confederate States of America|Confederate]] tax collectors who took the goods and stores their families needed to live.

Confederate deserters and refugee slaves formed a resistance group known as the Knight Company, led by [[Newton Knight]], First Lieutenant Jasper Collins, and Second Lieutenant [[William Wesley Sumrall]]. They were known to take refuge in a swamp along the [[Leaf River (Mississippi)|Leaf River]]. Along with as many as 100 other Southern men, they fought several skirmishes with Confederate tax men, then other Confederate units eventually sent to crush the resistance. In 1864 they took control in Ellisville, raising the United States flag over the courthouse in place of the Confederate flag.

In 1919, Ellisville hosted one of the most gruesome lynchings in history, when a black man, [[John Hartfield (lynching victim)|John Hartfield]] was found to have a white girlfriend. A story was concocted about a rape, and Hartfield was captured by law enforcement. The ''[[Jackson Daily News]]'' ran headlines that "John Hartfield will be lynched by Ellisville mob at 5:00 this afternoon",<ref name="Daily News">{{cite news |title=John Hartsfield will be lynched at 5 o'clock this afternoon |publisher=Jackson, Mississippi Daily News |date=26 June 1919}}</ref> and that a crowd of thousands was expected to attend. A crowd of around 10,000 came to watch Hartfield hanged from a tree, then shot repeatedly. When his body was cut down, pieces were cut off for souvenirs and what remained was burned. Commemorative postcards were printed.<ref>{{cite book |last1=McWhirter |first1=Cameron |title=Red Summer The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America |date=2011 |publisher=Henry Holt and Company |isbn=9780805089066 |pages=68–71}}</ref><ref name="NYTimes">{{cite news |last1=Barry |first1=Dan |title=Horror Drove Her From South. 100 Years Later, She Returned. |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/20/us/horror-drove-her-from-south-100-years-later-she-returned.html |access-date=18 November 2018 |newspaper=New York Times |date=19 September 2015}}</ref>

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Ellisville lost primacy to nearby [[Laurel, Mississippi|Laurel]], which became a center of the timber industry and cotton textile mills. Its population in the mid-20th century was nearly six times that of Ellisville. Laurel has attracted other industries and is the center of a micropolitan statistical area comprising all of Jones County and [[Jasper County, Mississippi|Jasper County]]. The Jones County Sheriff's Department is based in Laurel, but the county government is still based in Ellisville, at the Jones County Courthouse.

Ellisville reflects the demographics of the county and is majority white. Laurel is majority African American in population, reflecting the migration of agricultural workers to the city for industrial and urban jobs.