The Most Picturesque Towns In Mississippi

The prettiest corners of Mississippi tend to be the ones that held still while the rest of the country rebuilt. A photographer here is really chasing what got left behind and cared for. Southwest of Port Gibson, that means 23 Corinthian columns standing alone in a field where the grandest mansion in the state burned down in 1890. The towns below trade in the same kind of view, a bluff or a courthouse square nobody had the heart to tear down. Each one rewards the person willing to slow down and actually look.

Natchez

Natchez sits 200 feet up on a bluff over the Mississippi River, and the view down to the water is the reason people have been photographing it for a century. More than 600 antebellum buildings still stand in town, including Stanton Hall, which fills an entire city block, and Rosalie, which the Union Army ran as its headquarters during the war. Twice a year, during the Spring and Fall Pilgrimage, dozens of these private homes open their doors and you can walk right in. Moss-draped oaks shade the residential streets below the mansions, so the white columns show up green-framed in almost every shot. Down at the base of the bluff, the Under-the-Hill district keeps its brick streets and iron balconies right at the waterline.

Ocean Springs

Ocean Springs runs its whole downtown under a canopy of live oaks a few blocks off Biloxi Bay, and Washington Avenue gets the deepest shade of all. The painter Walter Anderson spent his life capturing this coast, most of it out on Horn Island, and his work hangs at the Walter Anderson Museum of Art right on that street. His mural-covered Little Room, painted to feel like a day on the island, is worth the visit by itself. From there it is a short walk to Front Beach, where the Gulf laps a shoreline that rarely gets crowded. Rent a bike and the Live Oaks Bicycle Route loops roughly fifteen miles past the bayous and marsh on the edge of town.

Bay St. Louis

Bay St. Louis held onto its nineteenth-century look better than most towns on the Gulf Coast, and the Old Town district over St. Louis Bay is where you feel it. Hundreds of Queen Anne, shotgun, and bungalow homes line the streets there, a lot of them painted in bright coastal colors and shaded by live oaks and magnolias. Many were summer places for New Orleans families, which is why the whole neighborhood carries a little of that character. Main Street sits a few blocks back from the water with galleries, antique shops, and the mission-style 1928 L&N train depot at the center of it. A public pier and a long sand beach open the whole thing up to the water. On the second Saturday of every month, the shops throw a street party with live music that pulls locals and visitors out together.

Columbus

Columbus came through the Civil War barely touched, so one of the largest collections of antebellum homes in the South is still standing along the Tombigbee River. The best known of them is the Blewett-Harrison-Lee Home from 1847, an Italianate house that belonged to Confederate general Stephen D. Lee and now runs as a local history museum. Around 650 properties fall inside the city's three National Register districts, everything from Greek Revival columns to Gothic Revival gables. What makes the Columbus Spring Pilgrimage different is that the owners host you themselves, walking you through homes they actually live in rather than handing you off to a guide. The Riverwalk trail follows the water past parks and open green space at the edge of the historic district.

Holly Springs

The courthouse square in Holly Springs has barely changed since the 1850s, and more than 60 pre-Civil War buildings surround it. The best story here belongs to the two grand homes just off the square. When Ulysses S. Grant occupied the town, he moved his wife Julia into Walter Place and set up his own headquarters at Airliewood, a pink-stuccoed Gothic Revival villa with a cast-iron fence copied from West Point. The red-brick Marshall County Courthouse still holds down the center of the square with its white columns. Each spring, the Holly Springs Pilgrimage opens many of these private homes, which is the one week photographers get inside the gates and up on the porches.

Water Valley

Casey Jones, the most famous railroad engineer in the country, lived and worked out of Water Valley for most of his career. His story is kept in the old depot, now the Casey Jones Railroad Museum, with a restored caboose parked right out front. The railroad reached town in the 1850s and left behind a Main Street of brick storefronts that locals have brought back to life. Murals cover a good stretch of those walls, including a big "Water Valley" piece that everyone stops to photograph. Just west of town, Enid Lake opens up rolling green shoreline for anyone who wants to stretch a visit past the historic core.

Corinth

Corinth grew up where two of the most important railroads in the Confederacy crossed, and that single intersection made it one of the most fought-over spots in the western war. Start at the Verandah-Curlee House from 1857, where generals from both armies were quartered and where the order that launched the Battle of Shiloh was signed. A few blocks over, the restored depot holds the Crossroads Museum, sitting almost exactly where the two rail lines still meet. The Coliseum Theatre gives you a completely different look, a 1924 showplace of black-and-white tile and imported marble that proves the town kept building well past the war. The earthworks and battery sites just outside town round it out, framed by open fields that have hardly changed in over a century.

Grenada

Grenada centers on a historic Town Green ringed with nineteenth and early twentieth century storefronts, a short walk from the Yalobusha River. The downtown historic district covers the commercial core, with old homes carrying the wide porches and cast-iron balconies of the period. A few minutes east, Grenada Lake spreads across roughly 35,000 acres inside Hugh White State Park, its shoreline backed by pine-covered hills. The lake has built a national name among crappie anglers, who show up in numbers when the fishing turns on. You get the small-town green and wide-open water on the same afternoon here, which is a rare combination in this part of the state.

The Towns That Waited

Windsor's columns outlasted the house they were built to hold up, and that same stubbornness shows up in every town here. The bluff, the depot, the courthouse square, the oak-shaded avenue: none of it is staged, and all of it is still in use. What is left standing is simply still there, ready for whoever decides to stop the car and take the longer look.