CALHOUN COUNTY, Miss. ( WJTV ) – All you have to do is follow Highway 8 or Highway 9 to where they intersect, and you will find Calhoun City. It is roughly equal distance from Grenada and Tupelo and Oxford and Starkville.

Calhoun City is built around a central square. It’s like a big traffic circle with stores, food trucks, and even a rolling produce stand that’s parked there when they can find something to sell.

I ran by the City Hall for two reasons. I wanted to meet Mayor Marshall Coleman, and I wanted to see the Ace Cannon Room.

Coleman is in his first term. He caught a vision for improving Calhoun City while he was deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, noticing all of the things our government was building there.

“We were spending a lot of money on sidewalks and upgrading them. Then you come back home, and your home town looks kind of deteriorated. So, I wanted to try to do something. If we can do it over there, we ought to be able to do some things here,” Coleman said.

As for the Ace Cannon Room, Ace was making hit records playing saxophone in the 1960s during the hot days of rock and roll. I realize he’s been gone a while. I remember him vividly. I asked my daughter if she had ever heard of Ace Cannon. She said he sounds like a private detective.

Just up the road is the county seat of Calhoun County, Pittsboro. There is the where the Governor Dennis Murphree’s home is located. The historical society uses it is a repository for their records. Those records are big with genealogists.

“We needed a place to pull it all together. And most of the people that we see is someone that does make a special trip from out of state,” said Rose Diamond, who’s in charge of the home.

Murphree was governor of the state twice. He was the 42nd and 47th Governor of Mississippi back in the 1920s and the 1940s, but he was never elected to the office. He was lieutenant governor both times when the respective governors died, and he finished out their terms.

Diamond said any future governor was probably nervous if Murphree was elected his lieutenant governor.

Under Murphree, the “Know Mississippi Better” trains went on good will tours of the nation.

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