After the Civil War, many freedmen continued to work in agriculture as sharecroppers and tenant farmers.

[7] European Americans founded Holly Springs in 1836 on territory occupied by the Chickasaw people for centuries before Indian Removal.

[10] By 1837, the town already had "twenty dry goods stores, two drugstores, three banks, several hotels, and over ten saloons.

[12][13] The area was developed with extensive cotton plantations dependent on the labor of enslaved African Americans.

[9] By 1855 Holly Springs was connected to Grand Junction, Tennessee, by the Mississippi Central Railway.

Toward the end of the 19th century, the Kansas City, Memphis and Birmingham Railroad was constructed to intersect this line in Holly Springs.

During the Civil War, Union general Ulysses S. Grant temporarily used Holly Springs as a supply depot and headquarters while mounting an effort to take the city of Vicksburg.

[9] The campus of the Holly Springs Female Institute, which had been open since 1836, was also burned, forcing it to permanently close.

[9] The Marshall County courthouse, at the center of Holly Springs's square, was used as a hospital during the epidemic.

Many blacks moved to the North in the Great Migration to escape southern oppression and seek employment in northern factories.

The invasion of boll weevils in the 1920s and 1930s, which occurred across the South, destroyed the cotton crops and caused economic problems on top of the Great Depression.

[9] After World War II, most industries moved to the major cities of Memphis, Tennessee, and Birmingham, Alabama.

[9] Holly Springs is located slightly east of the geographic center of Marshall County.

Holly Spring's climate is characterized by hot, humid summers and generally mild to cool winters.