Itta Bena, Mississippi
Itta Bena is a city in Leflore County, Mississippi, United States. The population was 2,049 at the 2010 census. The town's name is derived from the Choctaw phrase iti bina, meaning "forest camp". Itta Bena is part of the Greenwood, Mississippi micropolitan area.
History
Early history of Itta Bena
Choctaw Indians occupied the Delta region prior to the arrival of European settlers. The first removal treaty carried out under the Indian Removal Act was the 1830 Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, which ceded about 11 million acres of the Choctaw Nation (now Mississippi) in exchange for about 15 million acres in Oklahoma.
Benjamin Grubb Humphreys, a state senator from Claiborne County, Mississippi, is credited with the founding of Itta Bena. Following several crop failures in the 1850s at his ancestral home in Claiborne County, Humphreys took a trip by river steamer up into the Yazoo wilderness to look for a new farming opportunity in the former Choctaw area.
He found such an opportunity on Roebuck Lake, a stretch of old channel the river had discarded a few miles west of Greenwood, in what was then Sunflower County. Bringing a group of slaves up from his plantations during the winter, when boats could pass from the Yazoo into Roebuck, he directed them to begin the long task of clearing farmland from the overgrown bottomland. Longtime Claiborne County friends became interested in his project, and the first of them began to acquire land in the area two years later.