Gulf Ordnance Plant

Most of the people who made the shells here were women. At its peak the Procter & Gamble-run Gulf Ordnance Plant employed up to 10,000 workers, and in the war years it was the second-largest employer in Mississippi, behind the Ingalls shipyard. It ran from 1942 to 1945 and was abandoned after the war. Today Mississippi State University runs a cattle ranch on part of the site, and the rest of the buildings are in ruins. Prairie itself had counted only 122 people in 1900.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Howlin' Wolf Memorial and Blues Trail Marker — 13 mi
  A Mississippi Blues Trail marker and granite memorial on East Broad Street honoring Chester Burnett, who was born nearby in 1910 and became the Chicago blues giant Howlin' Wolf.
• Waverley Mansion — 18 mi
  A National Historic Landmark mansion above the Tombigbee River, home of a plantation family that enslaved more than a hundred people, left empty for half a century before a family restored it.
• Tennessee Williams Welcome Center — 25 mi
  The 1875 Episcopal rectory where Tennessee Williams was born in 1911, moved to Main Street in the 1990s and now Columbus's welcome center and a National Literary Landmark.
• Chickasaw Council House — 25 mi
  A roadside exhibit on the Natchez Trace Parkway marking the Chickasaw capital of the 1820s and the council house where the 1832 treaty of Pontotoc Creek ended Chickasaw title to Mississippi.

More markers nearby

• Prairie — 0.3 mi
• The Lenoir Plantation — 3.3 mi
• Sandy Clay Rosenwald School — 3.7 mi
• Reuben Davis — 6.4 mi