William Harris Hardy

Hardy's railroad career ran well past the town that bears his wife's name. He joined the effort to build a line from Meridian to New Orleans in 1868 and later served as its general counsel. In 1887 he became president of the Gulf and Ship Island Railroad and proposed Gulfport as its terminus, because Mississippi City lay too far from the deep-water harbor. The road entered receivership in 1896. Hardy later served as a circuit judge and died at his Gulfport home in 1917, five days after his eightieth birthday.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Hub City Historic District — steps away
  Hattiesburg's twelve-block downtown, a railroad town laid out in 1880s pine country, with the Saenger Theater, the courthouse and the 1910 depot.
• Forrest County Courthouse and Dahmer Memorial — steps away
  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 — 0.6 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.
• Mount Zion Baptist Church — 0.9 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

• Old Hattiesburg High School — 0.3 mi
• St. Paul Methodist Church — 0.5 mi
• Eureka School — 0.6 mi
• Roots of Rock 'n' Roll — 0.6 mi