The Lucie E. Campbell Gospel and Heritage Festival takes place each summer in Duck Hill.

He built the first home in the area, and developed his property as a cotton plantation, based on enslaved African American workers.

In 1856 the Illinois Central Railroad completed a line from Chicago to New Orleans, and it built a depot at Duck Hill.

[7] During the Civil War, Binford's sons, James R. and John A. Jr., helped lead the Confederate "Company E" of the 15th Mississippi Infantry Regiment from Duck Hill, known as the "McClung Rifles".

After white Democrats regained control of the state legislature following the Reconstruction era, Binford wrote the notorious Jim Crow laws for Mississippi.

[8][9] In 1887, regional businessmen hoped that Duck Hill would become a thriving mill town after iron ore was found nearby.

Tour of our Southern Correspondent reported in The New York Times: Duck Hill is the euphonious appellation of a straggling wee bit of a hamlet down in the depths of Mississippi, a dozen miles or so from Grenada, on the Illinois Central Railroad, known to the world and to history in something less than a wholesale way.

Two armed men, Rube Burrow and Joe Jackson, clung to the outside of a train as it left the station, then climbed to the engine cab.

The city also built an agriculture education facility for its vocational students, who were overwhelmingly African American in the segregated system.

[13] During World War II, African Americans from across the country were among soldiers trained and stationed in the South.

In 1943, fifteen armed black soldiers from nearby Camp McCain came to Duck Hill during the night and began firing into the town.

[16][17]The brutal lynching of two black men, Roosevelt Townes and Robert "Bootjack" McDaniels, in Duck Hill mid-day on April 13, 1937, gained national publicity.

These were among nine lynchings of African Americans by whites in Montgomery County, Mississippi, from the post-Reconstruction period into the 20th century.

[19] Townes and McDaniels were loaded into a school bus and driven to a wooded area near Duck Hill.

Hundreds of white people followed, and a crowd estimated at 300-500 looked on as Townes and McDaniels were each chained to a tree.

[22] Newspapers carried a photograph of McDaniels' burned and tortured body chained to a tree, and the lynchings were nationally condemned.

German newspapers at the time used the murders for propaganda, contrasting the lynchings to controls in Nazi Germany under the "humane" Nuremberg racial laws.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the town of Duck Hill has a total area of 1.0 square mile (2.6 km2), all land.

Of those include a small Jiffy Mart gas station where U.S. Route 51 and Main Street intersect and a Regions Bank.