However, with the rapid increase in the population of the other portions of Mississippi, the controlling influence at first exercised by Adams County gradually disappeared. This was further affected by the jealousy of our wealthy land owners which was felt by the inhabitants of the newer and poorer interior counties. Finally by Act of Nov. 28th, 1820, the General Assembly gave to the present city of Jackson its name in honor of our great Democratic warrior and statesman, and made it the future capital of our State. Thus the sceptre departed from Adams County; and while she has ever maintained a position in the State of which her citizens are proud, yet from this time she has ceased to be the political centre of Mississippi, and the place where its history is made. Yet hither must Mississippians ever come, as to the cradle in which the infant State was rocked. Hither will pilgrims journey to visit our historic shrines and to drink from the primal springs of a glorious past. The immortal Prentiss won his first laurels here; and here his ashes rest (side by side with those of Governor Sargent); while in our city cemetery sleep Judge Joseph D. Shields, his pupil and biographer, and the historian Claiborne, his great political antagonist. Vidal, the last governor of despotic Spain in Louisiana, here sleeps his last sleep in the land of the free; as does also Alvarez Fisk, the benefactor of the schools and libraries of both Natchez and New Orleans. Upon the rolls of our distinguished dead, besides those already mentioned, are the names of Thomas B. Reed, Edward Turner, Gerard C. Brandon, Christopher Rankin, Cowles Mead, Wm. B. Shields, S. S. Boyd, John A. Quitman, John T. McMurran, Robert J. Walker, Anthony Hutchins, George Poindexter, Lyman Harding, W. C. C. Claiborne, Adam L. Bingaman, Dr. Cartwright, Dr. Duncan, Dr. Jenkins, John I. Guion, Andrew Marschalk, and many others. But it is not her public or professional men alone, who have made the Historic Adams County of the past. "Her merchants were princes," in the olden time, when ships from the ocean were moored at the wharves of Natchez, bringing and taking in exchange the treasures of the old world and the new. Here one of the first cotton compresses was established. The old Mississippi Railroad, built in 1836, but completed only as far as Hamburg, was the earliest in the South and one of the oldest in the Union. Its old road-bed and massive embankments still remain,--monuments of the enterprise of our forefathers. Thus, even after her political supremacy had departed, Natchez still remained the financial and commercial centre of this State. But the great financial panic of 1836 and 1837 came, and like a cyclone swept our prosperity away. This was followed by the terrible tornado of May 7th, 1840, which laid our city in ruins, and numbered its victims by the hundred, and which is even yet recalled with dread upon each recurrence of its anniversary.