Gainesville Volunteers

The company came from a lumber town. The Pearl River Lumber Company opened at Gainesville in 1832 and became, by one account, the largest in the South, which helped make the settlement one of the most prosperous in antebellum Mississippi. Gainesville incorporated in 1843. The volunteers organized in 1860 and served as Company G of the 3rd Mississippi Infantry at Vicksburg and Atlanta. After the war the town declined when a railroad passed ten miles away and took the timber trade with it. The town counted 227 people in 1900, and NASA began eyeing the area in 1961.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• INFINITY Science Center — 0.3 mi
  NASA's visitor center for Stennis Space Center, at the Mississippi welcome center near the Louisiana line, with a Saturn V booster outside and a story of five river towns that were moved.
• Crosby Arboretum — 14 mi
  A Mississippi State University arboretum in Picayune showing the plants of the Pearl River basin, with Fay Jones's Pinecote Pavilion among the pitcher plant savanna and pines.
• Fontainebleau State Park — 25 mi
  Lakeshore park on the Northshore where Tchefuncte potters, Acolapissa and Choctaw lived, and where 153 people were enslaved at Marigny's sugar and brick plantation by 1840; the mill ruin still stands.

More markers nearby

• Napoleon — 2.1 mi
• Logtown — 2.6 mi
• Indian Village — 6.4 mi
• Original Lone Star Republic — 6.8 mi