| "Planter Samuel Carothers, an officer in the Battle of New Orleans in 1815, had this house built in 1843. In 1847, Dr. Thomas Dudley Isom purchased it. As a young trading post clerk in 1836, Isom had proposed naming the frontier settlement after Oxford, England, in hopes it would be chosen for the state university. Local lore credits the giant magnolia in front of the house to the young bride Sarah Isom, who carried the shoot from her home in South Carolina. In 2000, the University of Mississippi acquired the house, which is now the home of the Barksdale Reading Institute" (see Oxford Walking Tour, p. 2). Thomas Isom came to the area from Tennessee in 1835 as the nineteen-year-old agent of an Indian trading company. After completing medical training in Philadelphia, Isom returned to Ocford in 1839 to practice medicine. As a prominent citizen of the region, he was sent to the Mississippi secession convention, where he argued against separation from the Union. During the Civil War, however, Isom served as a military surgeon in Virginia with the 17th Mississippi regiment and later opened a military hospital on the University of Mississippi campus for the victims of the Battle of Shiloh. After the war, Isom continued his medical practice and became one of the most prominent and progressive physicians in northern Mississippi in his use of new drugs and surgical techniques. This house was individually listed on the National Register on 2 April 1980, and it was later included as a "previously listed" element (element #21) in the North Lamar Historic District, which was placed on the National Register on 14 November 2007. It is included in "Old Homes of Mississippi, Volume II: Columbus and the North" (1977) (pp. 109-110). [HABS: MS-254 (1975)] |