George Wardlaw

George Wardlaw, born in Mississippi in 1927, began as a jeweler, working silver, enamel, ebony and bone, and had stopped by the late 1950s. A thesis he wrote for an English course on Kandinsky's Concerning the Spiritual in Art pointed him toward painting. In 1955 he moved to Louisiana bayou country, where his palette grew more muted. Later, in New Paltz, New York, his grey hillside landscapes led to the Apple series, which occupied him for thirteen years. The Mississippi Museum of Art gave him a retrospective in 2015.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Brices Cross Roads National Battlefield Site — 5.4 mi
  The crossroads where Nathan Bedford Forrest routed a larger Union force in June 1864, and where Black regiments, many raised at Corinth, held the bridge that let most of the army escape.
• Natchez Trace Parkway Visitor Center — 13 mi
  The parkway's headquarters and official visitor center near Tupelo, with a film, a small museum of the Old Trace and the surviving New Deal houses of the Tupelo Homesteads.
• Chickasaw Village Site — 17 mi
  A Chickasaw village on a remnant of the Black Belt Prairie beside the Natchez Trace Parkway, with house outlines marked on the ground and signs that speak in Chickasaw voices.
• Elvis Presley Birthplace — 17 mi
  The two-room house in East Tupelo where Elvis Presley was born in 1935, with a museum and the church building the family attended, set near the vanished Black neighborhoods where he first heard the blues.

More markers nearby

• Elijah Pierce — steps away
• James Harrison "Babe" McCarthy — steps away
• Private John Allen — 0.9 mi
• Battle of Booneville — 10 mi