Old School Gymnasium

Mississippi's early modern architecture runs through this gym. The Jackson firm Overstreet and Town designed it. N. W. Overstreet practiced for fifty-seven years and has been called Mississippi's First Architect; A. Hays Town joined his office as an intern in 1926 and became a partner. By 1939 Town had designed modern concrete buildings across the state, many of them schools built under Depression relief programs. This gymnasium fits that pattern. Public Works Administration money paid for it, and it was finished in 1936 at a cost of $37,432.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Natchez Trace Parkway at Ridgeland — 2.5 mi
  The stretch of the Natchez Trace around Ridgeland, where a worn section of the Old Trace, the Ross Barnett Reservoir and the Choctaw town of Chisha Foka share a few miles of parkway.
• Tougaloo College — 4.9 mi
  A historically Black college north of Jackson, founded on a former plantation in 1869, whose students staged Mississippi's first sit-in and whose chapel hosted the movement's leaders.
• Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument — 10 mi
  A modest ranch house in Jackson's Elraine neighborhood where Medgar Evers was shot in the driveway in 1963, now a unit of the National Park Service.
• Mississippi Civil Rights Museum — 12 mi
  A state museum in downtown Jackson, opened in 2017 beside the Museum of Mississippi History, that tells the movement from 1945 to 1970 through the people who made it.

More markers nearby

• Farr Mercantile Company — steps away
• John Curran House — steps away
• Montgomery House — 0.2 mi
• Dorroh Street Historic District — 0.2 mi