Oak Park School

Leontyne Price's Laurel years show what the school built on. Her father worked in the timber industry at the sawmills, and her mother, Katherine, was a licensed practical nurse and midwife who delivered hundreds of babies in the region. Piano lessons began at about three and a half with Hattie McInnis, who later taught her voice. At nine she heard Marian Anderson sing in Jackson. Under Jim Crow she lived on Laurel's south side and attended all-Black schools until she graduated as salutatorian in 1944.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lauren Rogers Museum of Art — 1.7 mi
  Mississippi's oldest art museum, a 1923 memorial to a timber heir in Laurel, with a major Native American basket collection and no admission fee since it opened.
• Amos Deason House — 5.6 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.
• African American Military History Museum — 25 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.
• Forrest County Courthouse and Dahmer Memorial — 26 mi
  The courthouse where Hattiesburg held Freedom Day on January 22, 1964, and where a memorial now honors Vernon Dahmer, killed by Klansmen in 1966.

More markers nearby

• Ralph Boston — 0.6 mi
• Masonite Corporation — 0.7 mi
• Beacon Homes — 0.7 mi
• Dr. King Visits Laurel — 1.0 mi