Greenwood is a city in and the county seat of Leflore County , Mississippi , United States , located at the eastern edge of the Mississippi Delta approximately 96 miles north of Jackson, Mississippi , and 130 miles south of Memphis , Tennessee . The population was 15,205 at the 2010 census . It is the principal city of the Greenwood Micropolitan Statistical Area . The Tallahatchie River and the Yalobusha River meet at Greenwood to form the Yazoo River .
History The flood plain of the Mississippi River has long been an area rich in vegetation and wildlife, feeding off the Mississippi and its numerous tributaries . Long before Europeans migrated to America , the Choctaw and Chickasaw Indian nations settled in the Delta's bottomlands and throughout what is now central Mississippi. They were descended from indigenous peoples who had lived in the area for thousands of years. In the nineteenth century, the Five Civilized Tribes suffered increasing encroachment on their territory by European-American settlers from southeastern states. Under pressure from the United States government, in 1830 the Choctaw Principal Chief Greenwood Leflore and other Choctaw leaders signed the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek , ceding most of their remaining land to the US in exchange for land in what is now southeastern Oklahoma. The government opened the land to settlement by European Americans. The first Euro-American settlement on the banks of the Yazoo River was a trading post founded by John Williams in 1830 and known as Williams Landing. The settlement quickly blossomed, and in 1844 was incorporated as "Greenwood," named after Chief Greenwood Leflore . Growing in the midst of a strong cotton market, the city's success was based on its strategic location in the heart of the Delta; on the easternmost point of the alluvial plain and astride the Tallahatchie and the Yazoo rivers. The city served as a shipping point for cotton to major markets in New Orleans, Louisiana , Vicksburg, Mississippi , Memphis, Tennessee , and St.
