Emergency Biohazard Cleanup Near Downtown Hernando Hernando, MS

Hernando is a city in DeSoto County, Mississippi, and it serves as the county seat of DeSoto County, on the northwest border of Mississippi near Memphis, Tennessee.

Hernando counted 17,138 residents in the 2020 census, up from 14,090 in 2010, reflecting rapid growth in the Memphis suburbs.

Hernando was first called Jefferson by its early settlers, and it was renamed Hernando for the Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto, the first European to describe the Mississippi River, with the Mississippi Senate changing the name to avoid confusion with other post offices in the state.

Hernando was laid out in 1836 as the county seat on 40 acres donated by Edward Orne, planned around a 450-foot public square surrounded by 172 lots, and that plan still forms the center of the city; it was incorporated in 1839.

DeSoto County was organized on February 9, 1836, from land ceded by the Chickasaw, and both the county and its seat are named for Hernando de Soto.

The Hernando Courthouse Square Historic District, composed of eighteen buildings and one outbuilding facing the historic courthouse square, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1998.

The Hernando Commerce Street Historic District and the Hernando North Side Historic District were both listed on the National Register in 2001, preserving the city's late nineteenth and early twentieth century residential and commercial architecture.

Hernando's first courthouse was built in 1836 and was burned in 1863 during the Civil War.

At the time of French and Spanish encounters, the Chickasaw people had long inhabited the area around present-day Hernando, and the land was ceded to the United States under pressure following the Indian Removal Act of 1830.

Hernando grew from a town of 938 people in 1930 to 1,206 in 1950, and it remained a small county seat until suburban growth from Memphis transformed it in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.