New land for cotton production, land never before cleared of timber for farm use, was the reason for the Indian removal and for the opening of the frontier. The frontier attracted white settlers who bought land. Some of the planter class, bought large acreage and established plantations, but most of the land went to the yeoman farmer type settler who set up family operated farms. With family labor the yeoman farmer cleared the land, planted, produced and sold cotton for a profit far greater than he had ever before experienced or had ever thought or even imagined possible from a farm crop. Settlers lived on the frontier in community with other settlers and towns and villages developed.

In 1925, lumber supplanted cotton as the primary money maker for residents of the area.  Almost a century had past since the first settlers arrived on the frontier and the old town of  Walnut Grove had developed from a settler community to be an incorporated town. The lumber industry, supporting a new economy, built a new town of Walnut Grove.

There is irony in these happenings. Many of the residents of the new town were

descendants of the first settlers and most of the lumber being sold and shipped from the new town’s lumber mills was from timber stands, left untouched by the first settlers as they cleared the land. The timber was on land thought to be unsuitable for cotton production, land too wet and too steep, land in water soaked swamps and on rugged hillsides, not yet drained and not yet terraced.

In 1925, the Walnut Grove post office was moved from the old town of Walnut Grove to the new town. The new town, a planned community, was two miles south of the old town at the crossing of Mississippi Highway 35 and the new Jackson and Eastern Railroad. The old wagon road that connected the Leake and Scott county seat towns of Carthage and Forest,  upgraded and improved, had become Highway 35 and was Main Street through the new town. Surveyed and mapped, the new town had residential lots on named streets with alleys for delivery available to each lot. Electric power lines into the new town from Forest brought electricity for homes and industry.

A shopping district, north of but adjacent to the railroad depot and passenger terminal, had stores and shops around and overlooking a small park in a triangle formed by Main Street, Chadwick Avenue and Park Street, creating the appearance of "half a town square." The Gulf, Mobile and Northern Railroad bought the Jackson and Eastern in 1925, rebuilt its roadbeds and completed the railroad to Jackson in l926. Freight, passenger, mail and telegraph service, from Walnut Grove to Jackson and Meridian and to cities and towns across the nation, became available to the area.

Before the end of the decade of the 1920's many of the merchants at old Walnut Grove, with their stores and shops, moved to the new town. The old Walnut Grove School and the old town’s two churches relocated to the new town along with many of the people. 

The move from old Walnut Grove to the new town was only two miles, but the move