Hattiesburg, Mississippi Is the Most Interesting City in the State That Nobody Visits

We may earn money or products from the companies mentioned in this post. This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive a small commission at no extra cost to you ... you're just helping re-supply our family's travel fund.

Mississippi’s travel narrative runs almost entirely through three cities: Natchez (antebellum architecture), the Mississippi Delta (blues music), and Biloxi (Gulf Coast casinos). Hattiesburg — the state’s fourth-largest city, home to the University of Southern Mississippi, and a place with a civil rights history that should be far better known nationally — receives almost none of the travel coverage that those three destinations have accumulated.

What Hattiesburg Has That Mississippi’s Better-Known Cities Don’t

Hattiesburg’s civil rights history centers on the Forrest County Courthouse voter registration campaign of the early 1960s, where Bob Moses and SNCC organizers ran one of the first sustained voter registration drives in the Deep South. Vernon Dahmer, a local NAACP leader, was killed by the Ku Klux Klan in 1966 after allowing his store to be used as a voter registration site. The Hattiesburg American Cemetery and the Dahmer home site — managed by the National Park Service as part of the Mississippi Delta National Heritage Area — preserve this history in ways that are direct and specific and largely unknown to national visitors.

The University and Arts District

The University of Southern Mississippi has an enrollment of about 15,000 students, a significant performing arts calendar, and the Southern Miss Polymer Science department — one of the top polymer science research programs in the country, which is why several major chemical companies have operations in the Hattiesburg area. The downtown arts district that has developed around West Pine Street has galleries, independent restaurants, and the kind of walkable block life that university presence enables. It’s smaller than what you’d find in Oxford (home of Ole Miss), but more authentic in character — less curated for visitors, more functional for people who actually live there.

Hattiesburg is 65 miles north of Biloxi on I-59 — a 45-minute drive that most Gulf Coast visitors don’t take. The combination of civil rights history, university arts programming, and the Paul B. Johnson State Park’s lake system north of town makes it a legitimate day trip or overnight from the coast. Mississippi is one of the most historically significant and most undervisited states in the country. Hattiesburg is the Mississippi city that rewards the curious traveler who goes looking for the story rather than the attraction.