Appalachian Community Histories – Hudsonville, Marshall County: From a Stage Road Town to a Forgotten Mississippi Settlement
In the northern reaches of Marshall County, Mississippi, a small community once stood along the stage road connecting La Grange, Tennessee, with Holly Springs. During the 1830s, travelers passing through Hudsonville would have encountered a growing settlement of stores, houses, and families establishing themselves in a region undergoing extraordinary change. Within only a few years, the settlement had become an incorporated town, an election precinct, and a gathering place for local militia companies. Yet despite its promising beginning, the original Hudsonville would eventually disappear as the railroad drew commerce and residents toward a different location.
The history of Hudsonville is unusual because its name belonged to more than one community. The original town developed along the old stage road, while a later railroad station about two miles away inherited its name and much of its commercial importance. Over time, the older settlement became known as Old Hudsonville and was associated with the names Scales Station and Atway, leaving historians with a confusing collection of place names that sometimes refer to different locations.
Although much of the original town disappeared from the landscape, its history survived in legislative records, newspaper advertisements, family correspondence, postal documents, and the recollections collected by historian Franklin L. Riley in 1902. These sources reveal more than the decline of a country village. They preserve the story of a community shaped by western migration, slavery, transportation, religion, education, and the transformation of northern Mississippi during the nineteenth century.
The Chickasaw Cession and the Settlement of Marshall County
Before Hudsonville appeared, the surrounding countryside formed part of the Chickasaw homeland, an extensive territory encompassing much of northern Mississippi. The Treaty of Pontotoc Creek in 1832 and subsequent agreements in 1834 opened the way for the sale of Chickasaw lands, placing the region under increasing pressure from land speculators, settlers, and plantation owners. The resulting dispossession and removal of Chickasaw people transformed the region, while federal surveys divided the land into sections and townships that could be bought, sold, and developed.
Marshall County was established on March 1, 1836, during this period of rapid settlement. The creation of the county reflected the growing population of white settlers entering the former Chickasaw territory, many of whom arrived from Tennessee, Virginia, North Carolina, and other southern states. Some established small farms and businesses, while wealthier migrants developed plantations dependent upon enslaved African American labor.
The new county seat at Holly Springs quickly became an important center of government and commerce, but the surrounding countryside also supported smaller communities where settlers could obtain supplies, receive mail, attend religious services, and conduct business without traveling to the courthouse town. Hudsonville emerged within this network of roads and settlements, benefiting particularly from its location on the established route between Holly Springs and La Grange.
One of the families associated with the area was that of Dabney Minor, who migrated from Orange County, Virginia, in 1836 and established a home known as Woodlawn north of Holly Springs. Other families followed similar routes into Marshall County, bringing with them agricultural practices, family connections, and the social institutions of the older South. Their arrival contributed to the growth of settlements like Hudsonville, while also extending the plantation economy into lands that had only recently been taken from the Chickasaw Nation.
The Sudden Rise of Hudsonville in 1837
One of the most detailed surviving descriptions of early Hudsonville appeared in Franklin L. Riley’s Extinct Towns and Villages of Mississippi, published in the fifth volume of the Publications of the Mississippi Historical Society in 1902. Riley located the original town approximately four miles southwest of old Lamar, along the stage road between La Grange and Holly Springs.
According to Riley, Hudsonville experienced a remarkable period of development beginning in January 1837, when the village seemed to spring into existence almost overnight. Within a short period, approximately ten or twelve houses and several stores had appeared, transforming what had been a rural roadside location into a recognizable community.
The speed of its development was consistent with the broader settlement boom taking place across northern Mississippi. Land purchases and the establishment of farms created a demand for merchants, craftsmen, doctors, and transportation services. A town situated along a heavily traveled road could serve residents living miles away, allowing a relatively small collection of stores and houses to become an important commercial center for the surrounding agricultural countryside.
Hudsonville’s growth soon attracted the attention of the Mississippi Legislature. A municipal incorporation index records that the town was incorporated on February 16, 1838, citing page 241 of the state’s laws for that year. Riley also referred to incorporation legislation dated 1844, although the exact provisions of that later measure require examination of the original legislative record.
A contemporary state publication offers additional evidence of the town’s early importance. Besançon’s Annual Register of the State of Mississippi, published in 1838, identified Hudsonville among Marshall County’s election precincts and post towns. Its inclusion demonstrates that the settlement had already developed responsibilities extending beyond its immediate collection of houses and stores.
For a community only recently established, the combination of incorporation, postal service, and an election precinct suggested a promising future. Hudsonville had become a recognized part of Marshall County’s developing political and commercial geography.
Town Lots, Merchants, and the Business of Early Hudsonville
The earliest newspapers of Marshall County offer a more detailed picture of Hudsonville than later historical summaries alone. Their advertisements and legal notices reveal a community with numbered property lots, established landowners, commercial transactions, and connections to the county courthouse.
On March 2, 1839, the Southern Banner published a sheriff’s sale involving Lot 14 in Hudsonville and a nine-and-a-half-acre block of land. The property had been levied upon in connection with a debt involving B. W. Munsan and H. H. Means. Although the notice provided little information about the structures standing on the property, it established that Hudsonville already possessed numbered lots recognized in legal proceedings.
Additional details appeared in the Holly Springs Banner on July 20, 1839, when another sheriff’s sale identified Lot 26, part of Lot 1, and a neighboring block containing approximately two acres. The notice involved properties associated with Bullard D. Matthews and John P. Epps, providing evidence of landownership and financial relationships within the town.
These advertisements are particularly valuable because they suggest that Hudsonville was more formally organized than an ordinary rural crossroads. Numbered lots indicate that portions of the settlement had been surveyed or divided for individual ownership, while the descriptions of adjoining blocks provide clues about the arrangement of its property.
An especially useful notice appeared in the Conservative & Holly Springs Banner on May 5, 1840. It identified Lots 19 and 40, along with another block in Hudsonville, as property associated with John J. Wells. The notice also located the property within Section 33, Township 2, Range 2 West, providing a legal description that may help researchers reconstruct the location of the original settlement.
Taken together, these newspaper records establish that Hudsonville contained multiple privately owned lots and surrounding parcels involved in the ordinary business of property ownership, debt, and commercial exchange. They also provide a starting point for locating its original streets and buildings through surviving deeds, land surveys, and tax records.
Militia Gatherings and Life Along the Stage Road
Hudsonville’s location made it more than a place to purchase supplies. During the early nineteenth century, country towns frequently served as meeting places for militia companies, political gatherings, and other public activities that brought together residents scattered across the surrounding farms.
The Southern Banner of March 9, 1839, carried a militia notice requiring the Second Battalion of the Fiftieth Regiment of Mississippi Militia to assemble at Hudsonville on the second Saturday in April. Commissioned officers were instructed to attend the preceding day for drilling, while the First Battalion was ordered to gather separately at Waterford.
Such notices demonstrate that Hudsonville served as a recognized location for public assemblies. The militia system depended upon communities where companies could gather for inspections and training, and the selection of Hudsonville suggests that the town occupied a convenient position within northern Marshall County.
The roads leading through the settlement were equally important to its everyday existence. In July 1840, the Conservative & Holly Springs Banner published a livestock notice referring to George Doggett, who lived approximately one mile from Lamar along the Hudsonville road. The notice concerned a stray mare, but its reference to the road demonstrates how the settlement’s name had become part of the local geography.
Other notices reveal the agricultural character of the countryside. In June 1840, B. D. Matthews was described as living in Hudsonville when he reported taking up two stray horses. John J. Wells, whose property appeared in the earlier sheriff’s sale, was identified as living approximately one mile east of the town when he reported a stray mule.
These records offer glimpses of life that formal histories rarely preserve. Livestock wandered between neighboring properties, residents traveled to Holly Springs for court proceedings, and the surrounding farms remained closely connected to the town’s commercial activities. Hudsonville was not an isolated village, but part of a larger network of roads, households, and agricultural enterprises.
Families, Marriage, and Religious Life
The history of a community is often preserved most clearly through the ordinary events of family life. In Hudsonville’s case, marriage announcements and church records provide evidence of relationships that continued beyond the town’s commercial prosperity.
The Holly Springs Banner of January 11, 1840, reported that Alfred Jourdan and Martha Hudson, both residents of Hudsonville, had been married on December 31, 1839, by the Reverend John J. Wells. The same notice recorded another marriage in the neighborhood on January 2, 1840, when Major G. Comley married Elizabeth Tillmonstill, with the same minister officiating.
These announcements demonstrate that Hudsonville and its vicinity supported an active religious and social community during its early years. The presence of a minister conducting marriages also connects the settlement to the religious institutions that became important features of rural Mississippi life.
Presbyterianism developed particularly strong associations with the Hudsonville area. The Hudsonville Presbyterian Cemetery preserves the names of generations of local families, while an archival inventory at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary identifies a historical sketch of Hudsonville Presbyterian Church written by H. M. McLain in 1926.
Together with the early marriage notices, these records suggest that the religious history of the community continued long after its original commercial center declined. Although the precise development of individual congregations requires further study, the survival of church histories and burial grounds provides an important connection between the early settlement and later generations.
Slavery and the Lives Missing From Early Town Histories
The prosperity of early Marshall County cannot be separated from the institution of slavery. As settlers established plantations and expanded agricultural production, enslaved African Americans performed much of the labor upon which the region’s economy depended. Their experiences, however, received little attention in many of the county histories written during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
An advertisement published in the Conservative & Holly Springs Banner on May 5, 1840, provides one of the clearest surviving references to an enslaved person associated with the Hudsonville vicinity.
The notice, placed by William R. Harley of Holly Springs, offered a reward of twenty-five dollars for the capture of an enslaved young man named Ben, approximately twenty or twenty-one years old, who had fled enslavement in late April. Harley stated that Ben had previously been enslaved by John McKee near Hudsonville, where he had lived for some time.
The advertisement also revealed that Ben’s father was living on property associated with a Mr. Caraway near La Grange, Tennessee, along the Wolf River. Harley suspected that Ben might attempt to reach that area or travel toward one of several Mississippi River crossings.
Although the advertisement was intended to secure Ben’s capture, it unintentionally preserved important details about his life. His name, approximate age, previous residence, and separation from his father are all recorded in a notice written from the perspective of the man claiming ownership over him.
The surviving advertisement does not establish whether Ben reached his father, escaped permanently, or was captured. Nevertheless, it demonstrates that the history of Hudsonville included enslaved people whose lives were shaped by forced movement, family separation, and attempts to resist their captivity.
Their experiences must be considered alongside those of the merchants, landowners, and prominent families more frequently remembered in published county histories. Without them, the story of Hudsonville’s development would remain incomplete.
The Scales Family, Oakland, and the Civil War
Among the families associated with the Hudsonville countryside were the Scales and Minor families, whose records offer valuable insight into the plantation society surrounding the settlement.
Peter Scales and his wife, Ann Meriwether Minor Scales, moved from Virginia to Mississippi during the 1840s and established a home known as Oakland near Hudsonville. The plantation house, which no longer survives, stood approximately half a mile east of the railroad tracks according to a historical property inventory compiled for Marshall County.
The couple’s daughter, Cordelia Lewis Scales, later became an important source for understanding civilian experiences during the Civil War. Her surviving correspondence, written from the family home and preserved by the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, documents the concerns, relationships, and wartime experiences of a young woman living in the northern Mississippi plantation countryside.
The collection, known as the Cordelia Lewis Scales Letters, contains correspondence dating from 1861 through 1863. Additional family letters were published in Dear Darling Loulie, a collection that provides a broader picture of the Scales household during the war and its aftermath.
When Mississippi seceded from the United States in January 1861, families throughout Marshall County confronted the prospect of military service, economic disruption, and the uncertainty of prolonged conflict. The Scales correspondence records how news of the fighting reached households away from the major battlefields, while family members entered Confederate military service and those remaining at home attempted to maintain their accustomed lives.
These letters are valuable firsthand accounts, but they also reflect the perspective of a privileged white family living within a slaveholding society. They cannot stand alone as a complete account of wartime life around Hudsonville, particularly because the experiences of enslaved African Americans and their pursuit of freedom were often described differently, or omitted entirely, by plantation families.
The Civil War transformed Mississippi’s political and social order, and the emancipation of enslaved people fundamentally altered the relationships upon which plantation agriculture had been built. Although the original Hudsonville remained part of the local landscape, the decades following the war brought changes that would reshape the community’s population, institutions, and economic connections.
The Railroad and the Decline of Old Hudsonville
The greatest physical change in Hudsonville’s development came with the arrival of the railroad. Like many small towns established along stage roads, Hudsonville had grown because travelers and local farmers needed services at a convenient stopping place. Once rail transportation began to redirect commerce, however, the advantages that had encouraged its growth became less important.
Franklin L. Riley explained that Hudsonville continued as a country trading center until a railroad station bearing the same name was established approximately two miles southeast of the original town. The station belonged to the Mississippi Central Railroad, which later became part of the Illinois Central system.
This development created an important distinction between the old settlement and the community growing around the railroad. The original Hudsonville did not simply acquire a railroad depot within its established boundaries. Instead, a new concentration of commercial activity developed some distance away, leaving the stage-road town increasingly removed from the transportation route that mattered most to local trade.
The railroad offered farmers and merchants new opportunities to move agricultural products and obtain goods from larger markets. Businesses that had once depended upon wagon traffic along the old road now had reason to operate closer to the station, where freight and passengers could be transferred more efficiently.
Riley described the resulting decline as a gradual depopulation of the original town. By the time he gathered information about Hudsonville, he reported that only the family of Dr. Philips remained at the old location.
The distinction between the two settlements also explains why Hudsonville continued appearing in newspaper accounts and official records after the original village had largely disappeared. The name survived through its association with the railroad, even as the physical center of community life had shifted.
An October 28, 1870, issue of The Reporter illustrates how important the railroad had become. The newspaper described an accident involving an Irish railroad worker employed between Holly Springs and Hudsonville. While attempting to board a northbound freight train, the man fell beneath the cars and suffered a severe injury to his foot.
The brief report offers no full biography of the injured worker, but it documents the labor required to maintain the transportation system that had changed Hudsonville’s fortunes. By 1870, railroad work and traffic had become part of the community’s recorded history, replacing the stage-road commerce upon which the original town had depended.
Old Hudsonville, Scales Station, and Atway
One of the difficulties in researching Hudsonville is the variety of names attached to the surrounding area. Historical compilations identify connections among Hudsonville, Old Hudsonville, Scales Station, and Atway, although the precise relationship between the original town site, individual post offices, and the railroad settlement requires careful interpretation.
The Scales name was particularly prominent in the vicinity. Peter Scales was among the landowners associated with the settlement, and a postal history compiled by William S. Parks identifies him as the postmaster at a location called Scales beginning on November 8, 1859.
The same study lists a separate Hudsonville post office, with Thomas N. Guntharp appointed postmaster on May 5, 1857. The two offices were associated with different land sections in Township 2 South, Range 2 West, indicating that the names referred to distinct postal locations during at least part of the nineteenth century.
This distinction is important because place names sometimes survived after post offices moved, communities changed, or familiar landmarks disappeared. The name Scales Station became associated with the older settlement in later geographical and historical compilations, while Atway appeared as another name connected with Old Hudsonville.
Marshall County’s historical community inventory identifies Atway as a former postal community operating around the turn of the twentieth century, with dates extending from 1898 to 1911. These references demonstrate that the older locality retained a geographical identity even after its original commercial importance had declined.
Rather than representing four entirely separate communities, the names reflect overlapping histories of settlement, transportation, postal administration, and local memory. Reconstructing their exact boundaries would require comparing the nineteenth-century land deeds, postal site reports, and surviving maps with the property descriptions recorded in contemporary newspapers.
Reconstruction and the Education of Black Children
Although the railroad altered Hudsonville’s commercial geography, another transformation occurred during Reconstruction as formerly enslaved African Americans sought education and established new community institutions.
One of the most significant surviving records appeared in The Reporter on December 16, 1870. The newspaper reproduced proceedings of the Marshall County Board of School Directors, which had met on December 12 to determine locations for public schools throughout the county.
Among the locations selected was a church near Old Hudsonville where a school for Black children would operate. The board also identified a school location in the neighborhood of J. R. Mahon, north of the old settlement, although the notice did not specify the racial designation of that particular school.
These proceedings demonstrate that Old Hudsonville remained part of the county’s educational geography even as its commercial center declined. More importantly, the identification of a Black church as a school location illustrates how religious buildings could serve educational purposes during the difficult years following emancipation.
Additional evidence appeared in The Reporter on January 13, 1871, when the newspaper published further school board proceedings from the preceding December. At a meeting held on December 23, 1870, the board authorized a school for Black children on property belonging to W. W. Wallace at Hudsonville.
The board’s subsequent classification of schools also included locations near Hudsonville and at Wallace’s property among the county’s schools for Black children. The notices recorded the development of a public education system in which schools remained racially segregated and differed in classification and resources.
These records are particularly important because the names of individual teachers and pupils have not yet been connected conclusively to the Hudsonville schools. Nevertheless, they establish that Black educational institutions existed within the area during Reconstruction and that the county government recognized their locations.
The schools offer a different perspective on Hudsonville from the accounts of merchants, plantations, and transportation. They show that the community’s history did not end when the railroad changed the location of trade, but continued through institutions established and used by people whose opportunities had been profoundly restricted before emancipation.
Hudsonville at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century
By the early twentieth century, the original Hudsonville had become a subject of historical remembrance. Riley’s 1902 account treated it as one of Mississippi’s extinct towns, while identifying the families and local figures who had once been prominent in the surrounding countryside.
His list included Peter Scales, Dabney Minor, members of the Daniels family, Albert Hunt, John Roberts, Harvey Means, McFadden, J. R. Mayhon, William Arthur, Major Catrell, William Wall, and Kemp Holland. Riley credited Major William M. Strickland of Holly Springs for information about the vanished settlements of Marshall County, demonstrating that his account depended partly upon local historical recollections.
Dunbar Rowland’s Mississippi: Comprising Sketches of Counties, Towns, Events, Institutions, and Persons, published in 1907, similarly described the original Hudsonville as practically extinct. At the same time, Rowland identified Hudsonville on the Illinois Central Railroad as one of the county’s remaining settlements, reinforcing the distinction between the vanished stage-road town and its railroad successor.
The name continued to appear in local newspapers long afterward. On January 9, 1930, The South Reporter published a column titled “Hudsonville News,” providing a remarkably personal glimpse of the community during the early years of the Great Depression.
The column announced preaching at the local school building on the following Sunday morning, with Sunday school scheduled before the service. It also recorded visits among neighboring families, illnesses, hospital trips, and social gatherings connecting Hudsonville with Holly Springs, Oxford, Tennessee, and surrounding communities.
Among those mentioned were the Mathis, Hopson, McKee, Gilmer, Jones, Phillips, Collins, Roberts, and Woodson families. The newspaper reported that Dr. Herbert Phillips and his parents had visited Roy Phillips at the University of Mississippi, while other residents traveled to Oxford, entertained relatives, or visited family members receiving medical care.
Unlike the property notices of the 1830s, the 1930 column reveals a community whose identity rested upon personal relationships rather than the ambitions of its early developers. The school building served as a place for religious gatherings, families maintained ties across neighboring towns, and the ordinary events of rural life continued to give Hudsonville meaning.
The surviving report does not mean that the original town had regained its nineteenth-century commercial importance. Rather, it demonstrates that the broader Hudsonville community endured, preserving a name that had already survived major changes in transportation and settlement.
Cemeteries, Family Records, and the Surviving Landscape
Although the original Hudsonville no longer exists as the incorporated village described in the 1830s, traces of its history survive throughout northern Marshall County. Cemeteries, family papers, land records, and church histories provide evidence of the people who lived in the area long after its original buildings disappeared.
The Hudsonville Presbyterian Cemetery is one of the most recognizable surviving historical associations. Other cemeteries documented in the surrounding area include the Hudson family cemetery, the Holland cemetery, the Fields family cemetery, and the old Atway cemetery. These burial grounds preserve family names that can be compared with nineteenth-century newspaper reports, property records, and later genealogical research.
The Mississippi Department of Archives and History maintains original Marshall County tax records beginning in 1836, along with historical maps and other documentation that may help reconstruct the development of Hudsonville. Such records could be particularly useful when compared with the property notices identifying Lots 1, 14, 19, 26, and 40 and the legal land descriptions recorded in 1840.
The original town’s relationship to the surrounding countryside may also be investigated through the county’s nineteenth-century deed books and probate records. These documents could reveal who purchased the earliest lots, how land changed hands, and whether individual properties were abandoned, consolidated, or converted to agricultural use as the railroad settlement developed.
The University of Mississippi also preserves the McAlexander/Marshall County Collection, a substantial archival collection containing family genealogies, county histories, historical documents, and materials related to the region’s development. Together with the Scales family correspondence and other surviving manuscript collections, these records provide opportunities to recover details that were never included in published histories.
For researchers, the most promising unanswered question may be the precise location and arrangement of Old Hudsonville itself. The 1840 property descriptions offer a geographical starting point, but identifying individual streets, businesses, and houses would require additional comparison with original surveys and land transactions.
A complete reconstruction may eventually be possible, even if few visible traces of the original settlement remain.
Why Hudsonville’s History Matters
Hudsonville’s story reflects a broader pattern in American rural history. Communities frequently arose because a road, river crossing, or transportation route created opportunities for trade, only to decline when new technology shifted the movement of people and goods elsewhere.
In Hudsonville’s case, the stage road encouraged the establishment of an incorporated town during the settlement boom of the 1830s. Merchants and landowners developed property, militia companies gathered, religious and family institutions took shape, and the community became part of Marshall County’s early political geography.
Yet its development was also tied to the dispossession of the Chickasaw Nation and the expansion of a slaveholding agricultural society. The surviving advertisement concerning Ben, the correspondence from Oakland, and the Reconstruction-era school proceedings reveal histories that extend far beyond the stores and properties remembered in early descriptions.
When the railroad arrived, it did not immediately erase the name Hudsonville. Instead, the name moved into a new geographical and economic setting, while the original settlement gradually lost the commerce that had supported it. The people of the surrounding countryside continued to build families, churches, schools, and community relationships, preserving a local identity after the town that first carried the name had largely vanished.
Today the story of Old Hudsonville survives not through a bustling town square or a collection of preserved commercial buildings, but through the fragments left in newspapers, government records, cemeteries, and family correspondence.
The village that appeared so suddenly in 1837 eventually disappeared from the landscape, but its history remains part of the larger story of northern Mississippi, where the changing paths of roads, railroads, and human lives determined which communities would grow, which would move, and which would survive primarily in memory.
Sources & Further Reading
Besançon, L. A. Besançon’s Annual Register of the State of Mississippi, for the Year 1838. Natchez, MS: L. A. Besançon, 1838. Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/rc01002481/.
Carpenter, Edwina. “Railroad, Fire Highlighted Old & New Lamar History.” The South Reporter, April 29, 1982. https://msgw.org/marshall/locales/lamarold.php.
The Conservative & Holly Springs Banner. “Sheriff’s Sale and Reward Notice Concerning Ben.” May 5, 1840. Transcribed by Marshall County MSGenWeb. https://msgw.org/marshall/articles/18400505.php.
The Conservative & Holly Springs Banner. “Livestock Notices in Marshall County.” June 5, 1840. Transcribed by Marshall County MSGenWeb. https://msgw.org/marshall/articles/18400605.php.
The Conservative & Holly Springs Banner. “Hudsonville Road and Local Notices.” July 24, 1840. Transcribed by Marshall County MSGenWeb. https://msgw.org/marshall/articles/18400724.php.
Hall, Rachel Taylor, ed. Dear Darling Loulie. Broomhandle Books, 2014. https://books.apple.com/us/book/dear-darling-loulie/id919478070.
The Holly Springs Banner. “Sheriff’s Sale of Hudsonville Town Lots.” July 20, 1839. Transcribed by Marshall County MSGenWeb. https://msgw.org/marshall/articles/18390720.php.
The Holly Springs Banner. “Marriage Announcements from Hudsonville.” January 11, 1840. Transcribed by Marshall County MSGenWeb. https://msgw.org/marshall/articles/18400111.php.
Lowry, Robert, and William H. McCardle. A History of Mississippi: From the Discovery of the Great River by Hernando De Soto, Including the Earliest Settlement Made by the French under Iberville, to the Death of Jefferson Davis. Jackson, MS: R. H. Henry & Co., 1891. Marshall County historical extract available through MSGenWeb. https://msgw.org/marshall/locales/mchist.php.
Marshall County MSGenWeb. “Cities, Towns, and Communities.” Historical geographical records concerning Hudsonville, Old Hudsonville, Scales Station, and Atway. https://msgw.org/marshall/locales/cities.php.
Marshall County MSGenWeb. “Historic Homes.” Historical descriptions of Oakland Plantation and other Marshall County properties. https://www.msgw.org/marshall/locales/historic.php.
Marshall County MSGenWeb. “Index to Newspaper Articles.” Transcriptions and references to nineteenth-century Marshall County newspapers. https://msgw.org/marshall/articles/artindex.php.
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. Cordelia Lewis Scales Letters, 1861–1863. Collection Z/0603. Archives and Records Services Division, Jackson, MS. https://finding.mdah.ms.gov/manuscripts/z0603000.
Mississippi Department of Archives and History. County Tax Rolls, 1818–1902. Series 1202, Marshall County Records. Mississippi Digital Archives. https://da.mdah.ms.gov/series/osa/s1202/marshall.
Mississippi Department of Archives and History. “Historic Maps of Marshall County, Mississippi.” Mississippi Digital Archives. https://da.mdah.ms.gov/series/maps/detail/191481.
Mississippi Secretary of State. Charters of Municipalities: Mississippi Towns Incorporated, 1803–1925. Hudsonville incorporation, February 16, 1838, Laws of Mississippi, 1838, 241. Transcribed by Genealogy Trails. https://genealogytrails.com/miss/towns_incorporated.htm.
National Archives and Records Administration. Record of Appointment of Postmasters, 1832–1971. Record Group 28, Microfilm Publication M841. Washington, DC. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/postmasters-1832-1971.html.
National Archives and Records Administration. Post Office Department Reports of Site Locations, 1837–1950. Record Group 28, Microfilm Publication M1126. Washington, DC. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/locations-1837-1950.html.
Parks, William S. “Post Offices and Postmasters in Marshall County in 1860.” Marshall County MSGenWeb. Compiled from National Archives postal appointment records and federal census schedules. https://msgw.org/marshall/locales/po1860.php.
The Reporter. “Railroad Incident and Marshall County News.” October 28, 1870. Transcribed by Marshall County MSGenWeb. https://msgw.org/marshall/articles/18701028.php.
The Reporter. “Proceedings of the Marshall County Board of School Directors.” December 16, 1870. Transcribed by Marshall County MSGenWeb. https://msgw.org/marshall/articles/18701216.php.
The Reporter. “Board of School Directors: Establishment and Classification of Public Schools.” January 13, 1871. Transcribed by Marshall County MSGenWeb. https://msgw.org/marshall/articles/18710113.php.
Riley, Franklin L. “Extinct Towns and Villages of Mississippi.” Publications of the Mississippi Historical Society 5 (1902): 310–383. https://books.google.com/books?id=HkgTAAAAYAAJ.
Rowland, Dunbar, ed. Mississippi: Comprising Sketches of Counties, Towns, Events, Institutions, and Persons Arranged in Cyclopedic Form. Vol. 2. Atlanta: Southern Historical Publishing Association, 1907. https://archive.org/details/mississippicompr02rowl.
The South Reporter. “Hudsonville News.” January 9, 1930. Transcribed by Marshall County MSGenWeb. https://msgw.org/marshall/articles/newshuds.php.
The Southern Banner. “Sheriff’s Sale of Property in Hudsonville.” March 2, 1839. Transcribed by Marshall County MSGenWeb. https://msgw.org/marshall/articles/18390302.php.
The Southern Banner. “Militia Assembly Notice for Hudsonville and Waterford.” March 9, 1839. Transcribed by Marshall County MSGenWeb. https://msgw.org/marshall/articles/18390309.php.
University of Mississippi. Historical Catalogue of the University of Mississippi, 1849–1909. University, MS: University of Mississippi, 1909. https://archive.org/details/historicalcatalo00univ.
University of Mississippi, Archives and Special Collections. McAlexander/Marshall County Collection, 1838–2009. Collection MUM00287. https://egrove.olemiss.edu/finding_aids/154/.
University of Mississippi, Archives and Special Collections. Mitchell Family–Marshall County Collection. Collection MUM00687. https://egrove.olemiss.edu/finding_aids/673/.
United States Geological Survey. “Hudsonville, Marshall County, Mississippi.” Geographic Names Information System. Feature ID 693551. https://edits.nationalmap.gov/apps/gaz-domestic/public/summary/693551.
Author Note: Hudsonville’s history reminds us that some communities disappear from the landscape while surviving through newspapers, family records, cemeteries, and the memories of those who came before us. If you have photographs, documents, or family stories connected to Old Hudsonville, Scales Station, or Atway, I encourage you to share them so that more of this forgotten Mississippi community can be preserved.