R.E. Hunt High School

R. E. Hunt High School was named for Dr. Robert E. Hunt, a local Black educator. It replaced Union Academy, which then had more than a thousand students, and Mitchell, after a Mississippi State study urged the city to make separate but equal real. When integration came around 1970 it became a school for younger grades, and the city closed it in 2011. Graduates rallied to save it. Part of the campus reopened in 2012 as the R. E. Hunt Museum and Cultural Center, and in 2025 the school itself reopened for fifth and sixth graders.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Tennessee Williams Welcome Center — 1.4 mi
  The 1875 Episcopal rectory where Tennessee Williams was born in 1911, moved to Main Street in the 1990s and now Columbus's welcome center and a National Literary Landmark.
• Waverley Mansion — 6.9 mi
  A National Historic Landmark mansion above the Tombigbee River, home of a plantation family that enslaved more than a hundred people, left empty for half a century before a family restored it.
• Howlin' Wolf Memorial and Blues Trail Marker — 15 mi
  A Mississippi Blues Trail marker and granite memorial on East Broad Street honoring Chester Burnett, who was born nearby in 1910 and became the Chicago blues giant Howlin' Wolf.
• Sam D. Hamilton Noxubee National Wildlife Refuge — 27 mi
  A 48,000-acre refuge of bottomland forest and lakes in Noxubee, Oktibbeha and Winston counties, rebuilt from worn-out farmland, with red-cockaded woodpeckers, alligators and winter eagles.

More markers nearby

• Queen City Hotel (Blues Trail) — 0.4 mi
• Military Road — 0.5 mi
• Missionary Union Baptist Church — 0.6 mi
• Lee High School — 0.7 mi