Appalachian Community Histories – Cayce, Marshall County: From Bainsville to the Birthplace of Rufus Thomas
In the northern reaches of Marshall County, Mississippi, only a few miles south of Tennessee, the community of Cayce occupies a place in history that is considerably larger than its population might suggest. Once known as Bainsville, this rural settlement developed during the nineteenth century, served surrounding farming families through its own post office, and became associated with churches, cemeteries, and generations of residents whose lives connected northern Mississippi with neighboring Tennessee. Although Cayce never developed into a major commercial center, its surviving historical records reveal a community shaped by westward migration, agricultural labor, religious traditions, and the changing social conditions of the American South.
In 1907, Mississippi historian Dunbar Rowland described Cayce as a small postal hamlet approximately sixteen miles northwest of Holly Springs, the Marshall County seat. His account reported a population of only thirty-six people in 1900, a modest figure that reflected the settlement’s limited commercial development. Yet the surrounding countryside supported a much broader network of farms, churches, and family households whose history cannot be understood through the population of the hamlet alone.
Cayce is perhaps best remembered today as the birthplace of Rufus Thomas, the influential blues, rhythm-and-blues, and soul performer who became one of the defining personalities of Memphis music. Born into a sharecropping family in 1917, Thomas spent his earliest years in the Mississippi countryside before moving to Memphis, where his remarkable entertainment career would eventually bring national recognition. His connection to Cayce offers one of the clearest examples of how even the smallest rural communities contributed to the cultural history of the twentieth-century South.
The Chickasaw Cession and the Opening of Marshall County
Long before Cayce appeared in postal directories or county histories, the surrounding countryside belonged to the homeland of the Chickasaw people, whose presence across northern Mississippi predated European American settlement by generations. The Chickasaw Nation maintained important political, cultural, and economic connections throughout the region, including lands that would eventually become Marshall County and neighboring areas of Tennessee.
During the early nineteenth century, increasing pressure from the United States government and white settlers threatened Chickasaw control of their territory. The Treaty of Pontotoc Creek, concluded in October 1832, established arrangements for the cession and sale of Chickasaw lands in Mississippi. Additional negotiations in 1834 modified those arrangements, and the resulting process helped open extensive portions of northern Mississippi to white settlement while contributing to the displacement of the Chickasaw people from their ancestral homeland.
The Mississippi Department of Archives and History preserves original Chickasaw Cession land office records dating from 1834 through 1846. These surviving volumes contain township and range information, landownership records, and plats identifying geographic features throughout the territory. They provide an important foundation for understanding the transformation of Chickasaw lands into farms, plantations, and communities such as Cayce.
Marshall County was formally established on February 9, 1836, and named in honor of John Marshall, the former chief justice of the United States Supreme Court. Holly Springs became the county seat as settlers arrived from older southern states, attracted by the region’s agricultural possibilities and access to developing markets. By 1840, the county contained 17,526 inhabitants, including 8,260 enslaved people, demonstrating how quickly plantation agriculture and slavery had become central to its economy.
That growth came at a substantial human cost. The prosperity celebrated in nineteenth-century county histories depended heavily upon the forced labor of enslaved African Americans, whose work cleared fields, raised crops, maintained households, and supported plantation wealth. Their experiences were part of the early history of the countryside surrounding Cayce, even when surviving local accounts gave greater attention to white landowners and prominent families.
Bainsville and the First Settlers
The settlement that became Cayce originally carried the name Bainsville, although historical postal records also preserve the spelling Banesville. Local histories associate the earlier name with a landowner identified as Mr. Bain, whose property reportedly occupied the area where the community developed. The surviving accounts do not establish his full identity or the precise circumstances behind the settlement’s naming, but the association suggests how frequently early communities were identified through local families and landownership.
Historical research compiled by Thomas H. Boyd places the settlement’s beginnings around 1839, several years after the organization of Marshall County. Cayce developed near the roads connecting the Victoria area with Collierville, Tennessee, approximately eight miles away. Its location near the state boundary made it part of a wider network of settlements whose inhabitants maintained family, agricultural, and commercial relationships across the Mississippi and Tennessee line.
The earliest settlers included families whose origins lay in the Carolinas and other parts of the southeastern United States. Among them were the Boyds, who moved westward through South Carolina and into Mississippi during the nineteenth century. Boyd family records place members of the family in the Cayce area by the mid-1840s, where they established agricultural households and became associated with the nearby Mount Carmel Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church.
Other early families included the Carringtons, whose connections to the community are preserved in marriage records, cemetery inscriptions, and genealogical accounts. The Carrington family established itself in the area during the antebellum period, and later generations maintained ties to surrounding communities through marriage and agricultural work. Their surviving family cemetery provides physical evidence of the households that helped populate northern Marshall County during its formative years.
These records illustrate the gradual development of Cayce as a rural community rather than a formally planned town. Families settled on individual tracts of land, established farms, maintained relationships with nearby settlements, and created religious institutions that provided gathering places outside their homes. The resulting community was connected less by a densely developed town center than by roads, farms, churches, and family networks.
Mount Carmel Church and the Religious Life of Cayce
One of the most important institutions associated with Cayce’s nineteenth-century history was Mount Carmel Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church. Its establishment reflected the influence of Presbyterian families who migrated into northern Mississippi from the Carolinas and other southern states, carrying religious traditions that had been maintained through earlier generations.
According to Thomas H. Boyd’s family history, drawing upon the denomination’s 1905 centennial history, Reverend John Wilson organized an Associate Reformed Presbyterian congregation in the Cayce area in August 1842. The congregation initially consisted of twenty-two members, a relatively small gathering that nevertheless represented an organized religious presence during the community’s earliest years.
Wilson had connections to Chester County, South Carolina, and served a congregation near Porterville, Tennessee. His involvement illustrates the close relationships that existed among Presbyterian churches across state boundaries, particularly as migrating families established new settlements and sought ministers to serve them.
The Mount Carmel congregation eventually received a permanent pastor in Reverend James Sloan, a graduate of Erskine Theological Seminary in Due West, South Carolina. Sloan officially assumed his pastoral duties on April 19, 1846, beginning a period in which the church became an important institution for local families.
Mount Carmel remained active into the twentieth century. Reverend James W. Baird, whose family connections extended into the Boyd household, served as pastor during 1891 and 1892. The congregation’s records demonstrate the importance of religious institutions in maintaining social and familial connections across generations.
Although the original church building no longer appears to survive, its cemetery continues to document the people who worshipped there. Members of the Boyd family and other early residents were buried on the grounds, where inscriptions provide evidence of births, deaths, marriages, and family relationships extending into the nineteenth century. Boyd’s research described the cemetery as neglected during visits in the late 2000s, with broken or fallen markers reflecting the difficulties of preserving small rural burial grounds.
Other religious institutions also became associated with the surrounding countryside. Historical church directories identify Cayce Baptist Church, although readily available records do not establish its original founding date. Together, these congregations reveal the importance of organized religion in a settlement where churches provided continuity and a sense of community beyond the agricultural work that dominated daily life.
Cemeteries and the Families Who Built the Community
The cemeteries surrounding Cayce preserve some of the most tangible evidence of its early settlement. Unlike commercial buildings or rural schools that could disappear through abandonment and redevelopment, gravestones frequently remained to document the generations who lived and died in the surrounding countryside.
New Salem Cemetery is particularly important to the community’s early history. Research maintained by the New Salem Cemetery Association identifies Henry D. Lendermon, born in North Carolina in 1788, as one of the area’s early settlers. After living in South Carolina and Tennessee, Lendermon acquired land in Marshall County through a transaction involving Aaron Roots in 1837. The transfer was not completed until October 5, 1840, following complications associated with Roots’s death and the settlement of his estate.
Lendermon appeared in the 1840 federal census for Marshall County and died on July 18, 1845. He was buried at New Salem Cemetery, where his grave and the records assembled by later researchers help connect the community’s earliest period to surviving nineteenth-century documentation.
The broader cemetery landscape includes the Bowling, Harris Family, Joyner, McFerrin, and Shoffner burial grounds, along with Mount Carmel and the Carrington family cemetery. Their locations reveal how scattered family burial sites became part of the rural landscape, often serving households whose connections extended beyond any single settlement.
These burial grounds also demonstrate the limitations of written local histories. Although many nineteenth-century publications concentrated on wealthy landowners, merchants, or public officials, cemetery inscriptions preserve evidence of children, spouses, relatives, and individuals who rarely appeared in formal historical accounts. When examined alongside county deeds, marriage registers, probate files, and census records, they allow researchers to reconstruct more complete histories of Cayce’s early inhabitants.
The Post Office and the Growth of a Rural Settlement
During the nineteenth century, the establishment of a post office represented an important development for a small agricultural community. Rural post offices connected isolated households with relatives, businesses, government institutions, newspapers, and a national communication network that was expanding across the United States.
Cayce’s postal history preserves both of the names by which the settlement was known. Historical postal listings compiled by Jim Forte identify a post office operating under the name Banesville from 1884 until 1888. In 1888, the designation changed to Cayce, and the post office continued under that name until 1907.
The surviving listings establish the years in which the postal names were used, although they do not explain why Cayce replaced Banesville. The name change may have reflected local administrative or community preferences, but the available documentation does not establish a specific reason.
By 1890, Cayce was sufficiently recognized to appear among the towns and post offices of Marshall County in Goodspeed Publishing Company’s Biographical and Historical Memoirs of Mississippi. That work described an agricultural county supported by cotton, corn, grains, livestock, and other farm products, with expanding transportation connections centered around Holly Springs.
Cayce remained a small rural locality rather than a major railroad or manufacturing center. Its development depended upon the surrounding agricultural economy and the roads connecting residents to larger communities such as Byhalia, Holly Springs, and Collierville.
Dunbar Rowland’s 1907 reference work captured the community near the end of its postal era, identifying Cayce as a hamlet approximately sixteen miles northwest of Holly Springs and reporting thirty-six residents in 1900. The figure should not be interpreted as the total population of the surrounding farming district, since families living beyond the immediate settlement also formed part of its social and economic life.
When the Cayce post office closed in 1907, the settlement lost an important local institution, but the disappearance of the postal designation did not mean that the countryside had been abandoned. Farms, churches, cemeteries, and family households continued to connect the area to the surrounding county.
Civil War, Reconstruction, and Agricultural Change
Cayce’s nineteenth-century development occurred during a period of profound political and economic transformation across Marshall County. The community had been established before the Civil War, and its surrounding farms formed part of a county whose prosperity depended substantially upon enslaved labor and cotton production.
When the Civil War reached northern Mississippi, nearby Holly Springs became strategically important because of its railroad connections and military supply facilities. On December 20, 1862, Confederate cavalry under General Earl Van Dorn attacked the Union supply depot at Holly Springs, destroying substantial stores and disrupting General Ulysses S. Grant’s military operations.
Although the raid became one of the county’s most prominent wartime events, the available sources do not document a separate battle or major military engagement within Cayce itself. Nevertheless, the conflict and the abolition of slavery transformed the larger agricultural society of which the settlement was a part.
Following emancipation, African American families throughout Marshall County sought greater control over their labor, households, religious institutions, and educational opportunities. The transition from slavery to freedom was followed by systems of sharecropping and agricultural tenancy that continued to shape economic life well into the twentieth century.
By 1880, approximately two-thirds of Marshall County’s residents were African American, and agricultural tenancy was already a major feature of the county’s economy. The challenges of landownership, debt, and limited economic opportunities continued into the following decades, particularly among rural families whose livelihoods depended upon agriculture.
These developments formed the wider social landscape in which Cayce’s residents lived. The settlement’s early history cannot be understood solely through white landowning families and Presbyterian congregations, since African American agricultural workers and their descendants were equally important to the development and continued operation of the surrounding rural economy.
Schools, Agriculture, and Everyday Life
Although Cayce never developed a substantial commercial district, the surrounding countryside supported local institutions that served generations of farming families. Historical school directories preserve the name Bainsville School, identified as a former school in the Mount Pleasant area, demonstrating that the settlement’s earlier name continued to appear in records of local education.
The surviving directory does not establish the school’s founding date, whether it served the same location throughout its existence, or the period during which it operated. Nevertheless, the listing offers an important lead for understanding how education developed in the countryside surrounding Cayce.
Rural schools played an essential role in the lives of agricultural communities, particularly during a period when transportation to larger towns was difficult and public educational facilities were often limited. Mississippi’s segregated school system also meant that educational opportunities differed sharply between white and African American children, reflecting the wider racial inequalities that shaped the state’s institutions.
Cayce’s daily life remained closely tied to agriculture during the early twentieth century. Families depended upon the seasonal demands of farming, while local roads connected them to commercial centers where crops could be sold and household necessities purchased. Changes in agricultural production, landownership, and employment influenced both the prosperity of established households and the opportunities available to younger generations.
A brief newspaper report published in The South Reporter on February 4, 1937, offers an unusually specific glimpse into the community. Under the headline “Cayce Men Plead Guilty,” the newspaper described a cow theft case involving Grady Randall of Memphis, Ed and Percy Parker of the Cayce area, and Roger Salmon, also identified as living near Cayce.
According to the report, the three accused men pleaded guilty, and the newspaper recorded the bond amounts associated with the case. Although the incident concerned an individual criminal proceeding, its preservation provides evidence of named residents, rural property disputes, and the relationship between the countryside and the county’s legal institutions.
Such reports are valuable precisely because small communities often received little sustained attention from regional newspapers. In the absence of a comprehensive local history, individual newspaper notices, cemetery records, church documents, and personal papers provide fragments from which the community’s past can be reconstructed.
Rufus Thomas and Cayce’s Place in American Music
Among all the people associated with Cayce, none achieved greater national recognition than Rufus Thomas Jr., born in the community on March 26, 1917. His later career as a singer, dancer, comedian, radio personality, and recording artist made him one of the most enduring figures in Memphis music, connecting the rural Mississippi countryside to the development of blues, rhythm and blues, and southern soul.
Thomas was born into a sharecropping family during a period when agricultural tenancy dominated much of Marshall County’s rural economy. According to the Mississippi Blues Trail, his family lived along Mount Carmel Road before relocating to Memphis around 1921. Other biographical accounts differ somewhat on his age at the time of the move, but they agree that he spent only his earliest childhood in Cayce before growing up in Tennessee.
In Memphis, Thomas attended Booker T. Washington High School and developed an interest in performance that eventually led him into professional entertainment. After graduating in 1936, he toured with the Rabbit Foot Minstrels, a traveling African American entertainment company that provided opportunities for performers throughout the South.
The experience helped Thomas develop the combination of singing, comedy, dancing, and audience interaction that would become central to his public personality. He later worked as a master of ceremonies at the Palace Theater on Beale Street, where amateur performances offered opportunities to emerging musicians. Among those associated with the theater’s contests was B. B. King, who would become one of the most influential blues performers in American history.
Thomas also became an important figure in Memphis radio. Beginning in 1950, he worked at WDIA, the influential station whose programming helped establish new opportunities for African American broadcasters and musical performers. His career eventually connected him with recording companies including Chess, Sun, and Stax.
In 1953, Thomas achieved an important early recording success with “Bear Cat,” released through Sam Phillips’s Sun Records. During the following decade, he became closely associated with the development of Stax Records, recording with his daughter Carla Thomas and releasing a series of popular rhythm-and-blues and soul performances.
Songs such as “Walking the Dog,” “Do the Funky Chicken,” and “(Do the) Push and Pull” helped establish his reputation as an energetic performer whose humor and stage presence remained central to his appeal. He continued appearing before audiences well beyond the years when many performers had retired, earning recognition as the “World’s Oldest Teenager.”
Despite spending most of his life in Memphis, Thomas retained an important place in Mississippi’s musical history because of his Cayce birthplace. His career demonstrated the cultural connections that existed between rural northern Mississippi and the urban music scene of Memphis, where performers with roots in agricultural communities helped shape popular American music.
Thomas died on December 15, 2001, following a career that extended across much of the twentieth century. In 2012, the Mississippi Blues Commission honored him with a Mississippi Blues Trail marker near Cayce, preserving his connection to the community where his life began.
Remembering Cayce Today
Cayce remains an unincorporated community in northern Marshall County, its historical identity preserved through local place names, family records, cemeteries, and the roads that continue to connect the countryside with Tennessee and neighboring Mississippi settlements. Unlike towns whose histories are dominated by courthouses, commercial districts, or major industries, Cayce’s story is found in the smaller institutions that sustained rural life across generations.
The settlement’s early history reflects the transformation of Chickasaw lands during the 1830s, the arrival of new farming families, and the development of a plantation economy sustained by enslaved labor. Its churches and cemeteries preserve evidence of religious traditions and family relationships, while its postal records document the transition from Bainsville to Cayce during the late nineteenth century.
The twentieth century brought different challenges as agricultural tenancy, population movement, and changing economic opportunities reshaped communities throughout northern Mississippi. For some families, those changes encouraged migration toward larger towns and cities, including Memphis, where new generations pursued opportunities beyond farming.
Rufus Thomas’s life offers the community’s most recognizable connection to that transformation. Born in the rural countryside of Cayce, he became a performer whose influence reached audiences far beyond Mississippi, yet the historical marker honoring him continues to identify the small settlement where his story began.
Cayce’s history is also a reminder that the smallest places can preserve important pieces of a much larger American story. Its surviving records connect Indigenous dispossession, nineteenth-century migration, slavery and emancipation, religious life, rural education, agricultural change, and the development of twentieth-century music within a single community.
More than a century after its post office closed, the name Cayce remains on the map. Its churches, burial grounds, family histories, and musical heritage continue to testify to the generations whose lives gave this small northern Mississippi settlement its place in history.
Sources & Further Reading
Rowland, Dunbar, ed. Mississippi: Comprising Sketches of Counties, Towns, Events, Institutions, and Persons, Arranged in Cyclopedic Form. Vol. 1. Atlanta: Southern Historical Publishing Association, 1907, 381. https://www.msgw.org/marshall/locales/cities.php
Goodspeed Publishing Company. Biographical and Historical Memoirs of Mississippi. Chicago: Goodspeed Publishing Company, 1890, 256–258. https://www.msgw.org/marshall/locales/mchist.php
Boyd, Thomas H. William Boyd: A Family History. 2011. https://boydroots.net/downloads/William%20Boyd%20a%20Family%20History.pdf
Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church. The Centennial History of the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church, 1803–1903. Charleston, SC: Presses of Walker, Evans & Cogswell Co., 1905, 518. https://archive.org/details/centennialhistor00asso
United States. “Treaty with the Chickasaws, October 20, 1832.” United States Statutes at Large 7 (1832): 381–386. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/STATUTE-7/pdf/STATUTE-7-Pg381.pdf
Lusher, Henry M. Map of the Lands in Mississippi Ceded by the Chickasaws to the United States in 1832 and 1834. Boston: Pendleton’s Lithography, 1835. Mississippi Department of Archives and History. https://da.mdah.ms.gov/mapindex/index.php?view=142
Mississippi Department of Archives and History. “Chickasaw Cession Land Office Record Books, 1834–1846.” Collection Z/2077. https://finding.mdah.ms.gov/manuscripts/z2077000
Mississippi Department of Archives and History. “Marshall County Tax Rolls, 1836–1896.” Series 1202. https://da.mdah.ms.gov/series/osa/s1202/marshall
Forte, Jim. “Place Names of Mississippi.” American History and Genealogy Project. Historical postal records for Banesville and Cayce, 1884–1907. https://www.ahgp.org/ms/mississippi-placenames1.html
Blevins, Cameron, and Richard W. Helbock. US Post Offices. Historical postal geography dataset. Harvard Dataverse. https://cblevins.github.io/us-post-offices/
Agee Map Collection. 1895 Map of Mississippi: Marshall County. Birmingham Public Library. Reproduced by Marshall County MSGenWeb. https://www.msgw.org/marshall/maps/1895map.jpg
Marshall County MSGenWeb. “1908 Map of Marshall County, Mississippi.” Historical map collection. https://www.msgw.org/marshall/maps/1908map.jpg
The South Reporter. “Cayce Men Plead Guilty.” February 4, 1937. Transcribed by Carol Shrader for Marshall County MSGenWeb. https://msgw.org/marshall/articles/newscayc.php
New Salem Cemetery Association. “Snap Shots / Bios.” Historical biographies, family records, and burial information concerning Henry D. Lendermon and other early residents. https://www.newsalemcemetery.org/burials/snap-shots-bios
Marshall County MSGenWeb. “Cemeteries.” Historical cemetery inventory for Marshall County, Mississippi. https://www.msgw.org/marshall/cemeteries/cemdex.php
Marshall County MSGenWeb. “Schools.” Historical school directory, including Bainsville School. https://www.msgw.org/marshall/schools/schools.php
Marshall County MSGenWeb. “Marshall County Churches.” Historical directory identifying Cayce Baptist Church and other congregations. https://www.msgw.org/marshall/church/churches.php
Marshall County MSGenWeb. “County Resources.” Archival and microfilm inventory of census records, deeds, marriages, probate records, and newspapers. https://www.msgw.org/marshall/address.php
Mitchell, Bobby. “Some Early History of Marshall County.” Marshall County MSGenWeb. https://www.msgw.org/marshall/locales/mchist.php
Mississippi Department of Archives and History. “Mississippi Freedmen’s Bureau Records.” Historical labor, marriage, and administrative records, 1865–1872. https://opac2.mdah.ms.gov/freedmen
National Archives and Records Administration. Mississippi Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, 1865–1872. Microfilm Publication M1907. Digitized by FamilySearch. https://www.familysearch.org/en/search/collection/2333768
Marshall County Genealogical Society. “Genealogical Society Newsletter Highlights.” Historical newsletter index containing information on cemeteries, churches, families, and communities. https://www.msgw.org/marshall/records/gensoc2.php
University of Mississippi Libraries. “Manuscript Collections.” Antebellum Archives Research Guide. Includes descriptions of the Mitchell Family Marshall County Collection and McAlexander/Marshall County Collection. https://guides.lib.olemiss.edu/antebellum/manuscript
Mississippi Encyclopedia Staff. “Marshall County.” Mississippi Encyclopedia. Center for the Study of Southern Culture, University of Mississippi. Updated June 17, 2025. https://mississippiencyclopedia.org/entries/marshall-county/
Mississippi Blues Commission. “Rufus Thomas.” Mississippi Blues Trail. Historical marker and accompanying biographical research. https://msbluestrail.org/blues-trail-markers/rufus-thomas
Ellis, William Lee. “Rufus Thomas.” Mississippi Encyclopedia. Center for the Study of Southern Culture, University of Mississippi. 2017. https://mississippiencyclopedia.org/entries/rufus-thomas/
Owens, Anne-Leslie. “Rufus Thomas.” Tennessee Encyclopedia. Tennessee Historical Society, 2017. https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/rufus-thomas/
United States Geological Survey. “Historical Topographic Maps: Preserving the Past.” National Geospatial Program. https://www.usgs.gov/programs/national-geospatial-program/historical-topographic-maps-preserving-past
Author Note: The history of Cayce reminds us that even the smallest communities can hold stories connecting early settlement, family traditions, and the development of American music. I hope this article helps preserve the memory of the families and institutions that shaped Cayce while recognizing its connection to the remarkable career of Rufus Thomas.