Old Hattiesburg High School

After the school closed in 1959, the building housed the district's offices and later an antiques mall that stayed until 2001. In 2003 the Mississippi Heritage Trust listed it among the state's ten most endangered landmarks. Hurricane Katrina heavily damaged it in 2005, and a 2007 arson fire spread from the first floor to the fourth and collapsed the roof. The front facade was rebuilt by 2010. Renovation began in 2019, and the building now holds Preservation Crossing Apartments, 74 units in a $15.5 million project that used state historic tax credits.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Forrest County Courthouse and Dahmer Memorial — 0.3 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.
• African American Military History Museum — 0.3 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.
• Hub City Historic District — 0.4 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.
• Mount Zion Baptist Church — 1.1 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.

More markers nearby

• St. Paul Methodist Church — 0.3 mi
• William Harris Hardy — 0.3 mi
• Eureka School — 0.4 mi
• Roots of Rock 'n' Roll — 0.5 mi