Meridian, MS
A Victorian-Gothic rectory built in 1875 for St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Columbus, MS. Thomas Lanier Williams III — better known as Tennessee Williams — was born here March 26, 1911, the grandson of the rector Reverend Walter Dakin. He lived in the house for the first three years of his life before the family moved to Canton, then Clarksdale, and eventually St. Louis. Williams went on to write "A Streetcar Named Desire" (1947) and "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" (1955), winning two Pulitzer Prizes. The house was scheduled for demolition in 1993 when St. Paul's needed expansion space; preservationists moved it on flatbeds to a new site at Main Street and Tennessee Williams Way (formerly Third Street S), where it was restored to its 1911 appearance and now serves as the official Columbus Welcome Center. A certified National Literary Landmark. Columbus also produced Pulitzer Prize winner Eudora Welty (who attended Mississippi University for Women in town) and is home to Columbus Air Force Base — one of the country's largest pilot training operations.
2332 Margaret Walker Alexander Drive in Jackson — a modest single-story brick home in the Elraine subdivision, a Black middle-class neighborhood developed in the early 1950s. Medgar and Myrlie Evers bought the house in 1956 and moved in with their two young children. They picked the house at the end of a driveway, hoping it would be harder to surveil. Medgar still parked under a carport that was visible from the street. On the night of June 11, 1963, hours after President Kennedy's televised speech on civil rights, Medgar drove home from a NAACP strategy meeting at New Jerusalem Church. He pulled into the carport just after midnight on June 12. He was carrying NAACP t-shirts that read JIM CROW MUST GO. Byron De La Beckwith, hidden in a tangle of honeysuckle across the street, shot him in the back with an Enfield .30-06 rifle. Medgar staggered toward the front door and collapsed. Myrlie and the children, who had been allowed to stay up to watch Kennedy's address, ran outside. He died at the segregated University of Mississippi Medical Center about an hour later. He was thirty-seven. Myrlie Evers stayed in the house with the children for years afterward. She kept his civil rights work going, raised the family, and spent the next thirty-one years pushing the state of Mississippi to retry the case. In 1994 — after two earlier all-white juries deadlocked in 1964 — Beckwith was finally convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. He died in jail in 2001. Myrlie went on to chair the national NAACP from 1995 to 1998. The Evers family donated the house to Tougaloo College in 1993. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2017 and a National Monument under the NPS in 2020. The interior is preserved to its 1963 state — the bullet's path through the carport wall is marked. The driveway where Medgar fell is unchanged.
A two-room shotgun shack in East Tupelo, built by Vernon Presley in 1934 with $180 borrowed from his employer. Elvis Aaron Presley was born here January 8, 1935 — his identical twin Jessie Garon was stillborn. The Presley family lost the house to the bank when Elvis was two; they moved around Mississippi for the next eleven years before leaving for Memphis in 1948. The house was bought by the city of Tupelo in 1957 with proceeds from a benefit concert Elvis performed for the local youth. The 15-acre Elvis Presley Park surrounding the house includes the original Assembly of God church where Elvis was first exposed to gospel music (moved here from its original site), an "Elvis at 13" bronze statue, and a museum tracing his early years in the Shake Rag community. More than 100,000 visitors a year. Designated a Mississippi historic landmark; part of the official Mississippi Blues Trail.
A Gulf-front estate on Beach Boulevard in Biloxi, between Gulfport and Biloxi proper. Jefferson Davis, the only President of the Confederate States of America, lived here from 1877 until his death in 1889 — the years after the Civil War when he wrote "The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government" in the small library cottage on the grounds. The house was built in 1848 in the Greek Revival raised-cottage style; Davis didn't build it but bought it from its original owner's family. After Davis's death, his widow Varina sold the property to the Sons of Confederate Veterans in 1903 with the condition that it be preserved as a Confederate veterans' home (which it operated as until 1957) and then as a memorial to her husband. The site was severely damaged by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 — the museum and Confederate cemetery were destroyed, the main house unroofed. Restoration completed in 2008. The site remains controversial as Confederate-memory landscape, and the on-site Presidential Library was rebuilt as a more conventional historical museum.