Belhaven University

Belhaven began with fire. Lewis Fitzhugh opened Belhaven College for Young Ladies in 1894 in a Boyd Street house, and it burned in February 1895, only months after opening. A larger building of 1896 burned in 1910, so the school moved a few blocks north to Peachtree Street. A third fire, in August 1927, destroyed the central section; the surviving wings, stuccoed white, are now Fitzhugh and Preston Halls. Men were admitted only in 1954, when president Robert Crowe also added athletics.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Mississippi Civil Rights Museum — 1.2 mi
  A state museum in downtown Jackson, opened in 2017 beside the Museum of Mississippi History, that tells the movement from 1945 to 1970 through the people who made it.
• Old Capitol Museum — 1.4 mi
  Mississippi's Greek Revival statehouse of 1839, where the legislature voted to secede, Hiram Revels was elected to the U.S. Senate and the 1890 constitution was written, now a free state museum.
• Farish Street Historic District — 1.4 mi
  Jackson's Black business and cultural center, where Medgar Evers kept the NAACP office and furniture-store owners recorded the blues, now a quiet National Register district.
• Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument — 3.0 mi
  A modest ranch house in Jackson's Elraine neighborhood where Medgar Evers was shot in the driveway in 1963, now a unit of the National Park Service.

More markers nearby

• Eudora Welty House — steps away
• The Jackson Volcano — 0.2 mi
• Willie Morris — 0.4 mi
• The "Cotton Bale" Battery — 0.5 mi