Clifton Plantation was once a 1,440-acre property whose southeast corner survives at this site. In 1847, John Dobbins Murrell, a native of Virginia, purchased the property from J.B. Robinson and his wife Lucy of Louisiana. At that time it contained about 900 acres. By 1861, the Murrells had enlarged it to 1,360 acres and, according to land records, owned seventy enslaved people, thirty mules, cattle, hogs, sheep, wagons, farm equipment of every kind, and household and kitchen furnishings. In 1880, Sophia Murrell Ash and her husband, Dr. Matthew Ash, a Jackson druggist, owned the plantation. On November 19, 1881, a tornado destroyed the home and injured Sophia, two of their children, and five others. By 1883, a smaller house had been built to replace the original Clifton plantation home, and the property was renamed the Ash Place. After Matthew Ash's death, Sophia Murrell Ash sold the property in 1914 to James T. Mefford, Lawrence A. Horton, and Joseph J. Vaughan of Franklin, Tennessee. The Vaughn and Tucker families lived and worked on the plantation until Joseph and Helen Richardson acquired it in 1926. The Richardsons renamed it Hill View and owned and operated a cattle farm there. Over the years, all but twenty acres of the original plantation were sold for the development and growth of Ridgeland, including land deeded to Madison County in 1936 for the construction of what became Richardson Road. The 1883 Ash house still stands and has remained in the Richardson family since 1926.