Hattiesburg & the Pine Belt

A 21-mile black-water creek through De Soto National Forest, a national wild and scenic river since 1986, with white sandbars, bluffs and primitive camping.

A 44-mile paved rail-trail from Hattiesburg to Prentiss on the old Pearl & Leaf Rivers and Mississippi Central line that hauled the Piney Woods timber.

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.

A Greek Revival house in Ellisville where a Confederate major was shot in 1863, tied to the history of the Free State of Jones.

The courthouse where Hattiesburg held Freedom Day on January 22, 1964, and where a memorial now honors Vernon Dahmer, killed by Klansmen in 1966.

A frontier house on the Pearl River where the 1816 Pearl River Convention met, kept by the Marion County Historical Society and open to the public since 1963.

The state military museum inside Camp Shelby, where 750,000 soldiers trained for the Second World War, among them the Japanese American 442nd Regimental Combat Team.

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.

A school for Black Mississippians founded in 1907 in a former plantation house, with a restored 1926 Rosenwald building that now holds a museum.

The only place east of the Mississippi River where the United States detonated nuclear devices, two underground tests in 1964 and 1966 in Lamar County.

Mississippi's oldest art museum, a 1923 memorial to a timber heir in Laurel, with a major Native American basket collection and no admission fee since it opened.

Hattiesburg's twelve-block downtown, a railroad town laid out in 1880s pine country, with the Saenger Theater, the courthouse and the 1910 depot.