[2] Named for the Greek poet Homer, the town was laid out around the Courthouse Square in 1850 by Frank Vaughn.

The building, completed in 1860, was accepted by the Claiborne Parish Police Jury on July 20, 1861, at a cost of $12,304.36, and is on the National Register of Historic Places.

[3][4][5][6] The Herbert S. Ford Memorial Museum operates across from the parish courthouse in the former Claiborne Hotel (completed 1890).

[8] Adjacent to the cotton exhibit is the "Black Gold", a replica of an oilfield roughneck—a general laborer worker who loading and unloads cargo from crane baskets and keeps the drilling equipment clean—employed in the early 1930s by the Sinclair Oil and Gas Company.

The exhibit has a recording which explains how a farm family, growing mostly cotton and corn faced great economic travail in Mississippi but relocated to Claiborne Parish to take advantage of the oil and natural gas boom.

[9] Former Homer Mayor Alecia Smith was sentenced in 2017 after she pleaded guilty to two counts of malfeasance in office.

Many prominent citizens and local civic leaders in Homer and nearby Haynesville, are graduates of Claiborne Academy.