The Jackson Volcano

The volcano under Jackson has been extinct for at least 66 million years and sits about 2,900 feet below the Mississippi Coliseum. It left a dome of dense rock that shows in gravity measurements. The geologist E. W. Hilgard theorized an anticline beneath the city in 1860. The dome holds nearly pure carbon dioxide, which has been used in oil production in Gulf Coast fields, and oil wells numbered over a hundred at its crest by 1934. One hypothesis ties the eruption to the North American plate passing over the Bermuda hotspot.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Mississippi Civil Rights Museum — 1.0 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.
• Old Capitol Museum — 1.2 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.
• Farish Street Historic District — 1.2 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 — 2.9 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

• Willie Morris — steps away
• Belhaven University — 0.2 mi
• The "Cotton Bale" Battery — 0.2 mi
• Eudora Welty House — 0.2 mi