Historic Markers in Mississippi

Tremont, MS

Blue Star Memorials trace back to 1945, when garden clubs began marking highways to honor the men and women of the armed forces, borrowing the blue star from the service flags of the two World Wars. This marker in Tremont, Mississippi, was placed by the Edelweiss Garden Club in cooperation with the state Department of Transportation. Together such markers form a coast-to-coast chain of remembrance maintained by volunteers.

Pass Christian, MS

Though blues and jazz are often told as separate stories, along the Gulf Coast the two grew up intertwined from the start. Pass Christian's native son Captain John Handy (1900–1971) wove blues deep into his traditional jazz and rhythm & blues, as did other local players. The town has honored this African American musical heritage with festivals such as "Jazz in the Pass," first held in 1999.

Hattiesburg, MS

These weathered buildings are all that remain of Bonhomie, a company-owned sawmill town that the Tatum Lumber Company built here in 1915. For four decades laborers and their families lived in the shadow of the mill, part of the vast Southern pine industry that stripped and reshaped Mississippi's forests. When the timber and the mill's fortunes ran out, the town faded by 1956.

Hattiesburg, MS

Bonhomie was a company town conjured out of the Mississippi pine woods, born in 1915 when the Tatum Lumber Company built its mill and drew workers and their families to the site. At its peak it had a doctor's office, church, school, and train station—a self-contained world that lived and died by the timber. When the virgin forests were logged out, the jobs vanished and Bonhomie faded into an extinct town, its remnants later tended during a timberland restoration begun in 2000.

Pontotoc County, MS

In the 1820s, the Chickasaw village known here as "Pontatock," set along the ancient Natchez Trace, held the council house that served as the seat of the Chickasaw Nation. From this ground the nation deliberated its affairs in the decade before the pressures of removal drove the Chickasaw west of the Mississippi. The site marks a center of self-government for one of the great nations of the Southeast on the eve of a wrenching displacement.

Biloxi, MS

Built in 1934 on the Biloxi waterfront, this reinforced-concrete barracks served the U.S. Coast Guard during an era when the service was expanding its Gulf Coast presence. Its E-shaped Spanish Colonial Revival design reflects the popular public-building style of the Depression years along the Mississippi coast. The structure housed the men who patrolled these waters for rescue, navigation, and enforcement duties.

Pass Christian, MS

Built in 1851 by John Backe of New Orleans, this Pass Christian home hosted President Woodrow Wilson and his family for a winter vacation in 1913, as guests of owner Miss Alice Herndon. The stay gave the house its enduring nickname, the "Dixie White House." The Mississippi Department of Archives and History placed the marker in 2008.

Long Beach, MS

In 1788 Nicholas and Marianne Ladner became the first Europeans to settle this stretch of the Gulf Coast, raising a log house known as "The Chimneys" that mariners used as a landmark on the run between Mobile and New Orleans. After Nicholas died, Spanish authorities granted the land to his widow, and the resulting Widow Ladner Claim still underlies much of modern Long Beach.

Tupelo, MS

In a two-room house his father built in East Tupelo, Elvis Aaron Presley was born in January 1935 into a poor family during the Depression. From those modest Mississippi beginnings he rose to reshape American popular music, fusing regional sounds into a style that reached a national and then global audience before his death in Memphis in 1977. The preserved birthplace anchors the story of how far he traveled from small-town Lee County.

Tupelo, MS

This two-room shotgun house is where Elvis Presley was born in 1935, in a working-class corner of Tupelo. After Elvis rose to fame he funded a park here with proceeds from a 1957 hometown concert, and the women of the East Heights Garden Club took on the restoration — scrubbing, painting, and furnishing the rooms with period pieces donated by local residents so it could open to fans in 1971. Their volunteer hostesses often met travelers outside town to guide them in.

Tupelo, MS

This restored sanctuary recreates the First Assembly of God church that a young Elvis Presley and his family attended in Depression- and wartime-era Tupelo. In these small Pentecostal congregations, services ran long into the evening and were filled with fervent gospel singing — the sound that first stirred the boy who would remake American popular music. Moved and restored beside the Presley birthplace, the building lets visitors sit in on a 1940s-style service.

Gulfport, MS

This Ionic-columned, neoclassical house was built around 1900 for T.G.B. Kellier and later owned by Edward Sternberg, a claims manager for the Louisville & Nashville Railroad. In its final years it housed "The Chimneys" restaurant before Hurricane Katrina destroyed it in 2005.

Amory, MS

This memorial in Amory honors local men who served in the Korean War, the hard-fought conflict of 1950–1953 that Americans sometimes called the 'Forgotten War.' Its stark dedication — 'their lives for our freedom' — speaks for the soldiers from small Mississippi towns who shipped out to a cold, distant peninsula. Communities across the South raised such markers to ensure that sacrifice in a war overshadowed by others would not be forgotten at home.

Lamar County, MS

On July 8, 1889, on Richburg Hill in southern Mississippi, John L. Sullivan outlasted Jake Kilrain over an astonishing seventy-five rounds under the broiling sun to keep his heavyweight crown. It was the last major bare-knuckle heavyweight championship in America — after it, the padded gloves and rounds of the Marquess of Queensberry rules took over the sport. Fought quietly to dodge anti-prizefighting laws, the bout became instant legend.

Gulfport, MS

Built in 1923 to a design by noted Mississippi architect N.W. Overstreet, this school replaced two earlier buildings that had each burned. It opened in 1924 on 15th Street, later became Central Junior High, and after closing in 1999 was reborn as a federal courthouse annex.

Oxford, MS

This white-columned house on the edge of Oxford was raised around 1848, in the cotton-wealthy years before the Civil War, and later took the name Rowan Oak from its owner, Nobel laureate William Faulkner, who lived and wrote here from 1930 until 1962. Faulkner bought the run-down antebellum place and restored it by hand, and its quiet grounds and cedar-lined walk became the private world behind the fictional Yoknapatawpha County. Much of his greatest work took shape in these rooms.

Pass Christian, MS · est. 2013

Pierre Saucier — whose son later became mayor of Pass Christian — built this two-story Greek Revival house around 1855, with a temple-like portico, square-columned galleries, and an octagonal Gothic Revival outbuilding on the grounds. It later belonged to the renowned New Orleans theatre impresario David Bidwell and was known locally as "Union Quarters." Hurricane Katrina destroyed the landmark in 2005.

Pass Christian, MS

Along Pass Christian's beachfront, wealthy families built architecturally significant vacation villas beneath live oaks, earning the shoreline the nickname "the Newport of the South." For generations this stretch held the Mississippi Gulf Coast's finest concentration of 19th- and early-20th-century beachfront mansions, later recognized as a National Register historic district. Hurricane Katrina swept away much of that heritage in 2005, especially at the district's western end.

Gulfport, MS · est. 2013

Organized as a mission parish in 1846, St. Mark's began as a simple frame building with twin front doors and grew over the decades before being moved inland from the beachfront in 1925. Among its members was Jefferson Davis, who spent his last years nearby on the Mississippi coast. Battered by Hurricane Camille in 1969 and destroyed by Katrina in 2005, the congregation relocated inland.

Natchez, MS

In 1837 Natchez was named the seat of the new Roman Catholic diocese covering Mississippi, and in 1842 Bishop J. M. Chanche began building this church—the only one in the state actually constructed as a cathedral. Rising in a bustling antebellum river town, it reflected the growing Catholic presence in the Deep South.

Columbus, MS · est. 1974

Tennessee Williams was born in this Columbus, Mississippi, house in 1911, spending his earliest years in the Deep South whose voices and tensions would fill his plays. He rose to become one of America's foremost dramatists, winning the Pulitzer Prize for both 'A Streetcar Named Desire' and 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,' works steeped in Southern settings. The marker honors this as his first home.