The Chautauqua Spring House, located in the hollow due west of here off the Tree Top Trail, was built to shelter the clear spring that supplied drinking water to the Chautauqua Hotel and campground in the early twentieth century. This natural spring is typical of many in the area and helps explain why the town was named Crystal Springs. Crystal Springs was first settled by Methodist preacher Elisha Lott in 1823 after the state legislature established Copiah County as Mississippi’s eighteenth county. The original town stood about three miles west of its current location. Copiah County, whose name derived from the Choctaw words for “calling panther,” was carved from Hinds County three years after the Choctaw Nation ceded the land in the Treaty of Doak’s Stand in 1820 and after Mississippi entered the Union as the twentieth state in 1817. Crystal Springs moved to its present location in 1858 when the railroad was built through this area on the main ridge separating the Pearl River and Mississippi River watersheds.