Tobias Magee, a veteran of the War of 1812, came to Mississippi about 1815, where he and his wife, Nancy Stevens Magee, reared their seventeen children. By 1841 Magee had purchased over eighty acres of land in this area and began to raise cotton and sugar cane, which was shipped to New Orleans from Monticello by steamboat. In 1907 the Prentiss Institute, a school for young African Americans, was established on forty acres of the former Magee property.