Old Augusta

A huge crowd gathered on the Leaf River bank outside Augusta on October 30, 1857, to watch James Copeland hang. His clan stole livestock and enslaved people across the Gulf South. Gang members, sometimes at slave revivals, promised to lead enslaved people to freedom, then sold them at distant auctions. While waiting to die, Copeland dictated a confession to Sheriff J. R. S. Pitts. It was printed in 1858 and caused a furor in the Piney Woods, but no copy of that first edition has ever surfaced, and rumor said the gang's kin had sworn to steal every one.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Mississippi Armed Forces Museum — 11 mi
  The state military museum inside Camp Shelby, where 750,000 soldiers trained for the Second World War, among them the Japanese American 442nd Regimental Combat Team.
• Black Creek Wild and Scenic River — 11 mi
  A 21-mile black-water creek through De Soto National Forest, a national wild and scenic river since 1986, with white sandbars, bluffs and primitive camping.
• Mount Zion Baptist Church — 17 mi
  Hattiesburg's "Civil Rights Church," a Freedom School site in 1964 where Pete Seeger taught music and Martin Luther King Jr. spoke weeks before his death.
• Hub City Historic District — 17 mi
  Hattiesburg's twelve-block downtown, a railroad town laid out in 1880s pine country, with the Saenger Theater, the courthouse and the 1910 depot.

More markers nearby

• Forrest County Agricultural High School — 13 mi
• Hi-Hat Club — 15 mi
• Old West Florida — 17 mi
• Bonhomie — 17 mi