Thomas Lanier Williams III, who became Tennessee Williams, was born on 26 March 1911 in Columbus, where his grandfather, the Reverend Walter Dakin, was rector of St. Paul's Episcopal Church. The house is the church's 1875 Victorian rectory. In 1993 the church planned an expansion, the rectory faced demolition, and it was loaded onto flatbed trucks and moved to Main Street at Third Street South. It has been restored and now serves as the city's welcome center, with a small museum, and it is a National Literary Landmark.
Williams lived only a short time in Mississippi. His family moved to Nashville when he was two and returned in 1915 when his grandfather became rector in Canton and then Clarksdale. His mother Edwina and her parents read to him, and he and his sister Rose loved the stories told by their Black nurse, Ossie. In 1918 his father took the family to St. Louis, and the Mississippi years stayed with him as a lost Eden.
Columbus itself is worth walking from the welcome center. In 1860 seventy-one percent of Lowndes County's people were enslaved. The Industrial Institute and College, the first public university for women in the country, opened here in 1884, for white women only; its first Black students arrived in 1966, and it is now Mississippi University for Women.
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