The Piney Woods School

Laurence Jones's best fundraising came on television. In 1954 he appeared on This Is Your Life, and viewers were asked to send $1 each; the appeal raised about $700,000 for an endowment, reported at about $7 million when he died in 1975. The school he founded in 1909 still mixes classes with chores on a campus of about 2,000 acres with its own farm, post office and chapel. Listed on the National Register in 2020, it is among the last four historically Black boarding schools in the country, and the second oldest still operating.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Old Capitol Museum — 20 mi
  Mississippi's Greek Revival statehouse of 1839, where the legislature voted to secede, Hiram Revels was elected to the U.S. Senate and the 1890 constitution was written, now a free state museum.
• Mississippi Civil Rights Museum — 20 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.
• Farish Street Historic District — 20 mi
  Jackson's Black business and cultural center, where Medgar Evers kept the NAACP office and furniture-store owners recorded the blues, now a quiet National Register district.
• Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument — 23 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.

More markers nearby

• Piney Woods — steps away
• Martha Louise Morrow Foxx — steps away
• Wesleyanna Methodist Church — 4.0 mi
• Seminary Square — 14 mi