Courthouse Square at Williamsburg

Williamsburg held Covington County's courthouse until the seat moved to Collins in 1906. The 1820 census counted 1,824 white residents and 406 enslaved people; by 1860 it counted 2,845 and 1,564. That enslaved share was low for Mississippi. While much of the state intensified cotton in the late antebellum years, Covington, like other Piney Woods counties, cut back, ranking in the bottom ten for cotton, corn and livestock yet among the top rice producers. A small number of men worked in manufacturing, mostly in lumber mills, and as late as 1880 the county had only six thousand people.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Prentiss Institute — 15 mi
  A school for Black Mississippians founded in 1907 in a former plantation house, with a restored 1926 Rosenwald building that now holds a museum.
• Amos Deason House — 24 mi
  A Greek Revival house in Ellisville where a Confederate major was shot in 1863, tied to the history of the Free State of Jones.
• Longleaf Trace — 26 mi
  A 44-mile paved rail-trail from Hattiesburg to Prentiss on the old Pearl & Leaf Rivers and Mississippi Central line that hauled the Piney Woods timber.
• African American Military History Museum — 27 mi
  The wooden USO club that opened in March 1942 for Black soldiers training at Camp Shelby, now a museum of African American military service from the Revolutionary War to Iraq.

More markers nearby

• Carver Central High School — 3.3 mi
• John Crowe Ransom — 18 mi
• Vernon F. Dahmer, Sr. — 23 mi
• Ellisville State School — 23 mi