Columbus, MS Summary

The pretty antebellum city of Columbus sits close to the Alabama state line off Hwy 82.

Despite its small population of 23,799, Columbus packs in a lot of attractions, starting right on Main Street with the Victorian building that was the birthplace of playwright Tennessee Williams. Now a Mississippi Welcome Center, it’s the place for visitors to scoop up walking tour maps and information on the town’s history.

Columbus grew from a trading post in the late eighteenth century into a center for a wide range of agricultural industries before becoming a place of higher learning.

After establishing the state’s first free public school in 1821, Columbus turned its attention to developing Mississippi’s first college for women in 1847. Now the Mississippi University for Women, it is an interesting faculty, only admitting men since 1982 and also offering a degree in culinary arts. Writer Eudora Welty is the university’s most famous alumna.

Around Third Avenue are a host of Gothic and Greek Revival buildings as well as a number of ornate townhouses built by wealthy nineteenth-century planters and their families.

Although Columbus was not involved in any battles in the Civil War, its buildings became hospitals for soldiers from both armies. The town’s Decoration Day dates from 1866 when a group of local matrons meeting at Twelve Gables initiated the practice of laying flowers on the graves of Union soldiers, in addition to Confederate graves of their own family members at Friendship Cemetery.

As the story of this “Blue and Gray” gesture became widespread, Decoration Day evolved into the nation’s official Memorial Day.

The highlight of this event in Columbus takes place after dark, with costumed guides directing a candlelight tour around Friendship Cemetery, complete with tales of the interred residents.

Columbus opens the doors to a number of its historic homes, including the circa-1838 Twelve Gables, during its Spring Pilgrimage tours.

Several churches that served as Civil War field hospitals are also included.

Waverley Plantation, located off State Route 50 near the Tombigbee River, is open year-round. Once the largest estate in the area with more than 1,000 slaves working its fields, the plantation lay in ruin until the 1960s. Now painstakingly restored to its former magnificence, it has obligingly produced an apparition of a young girl in period nightclothes.

Columbus lies on the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway — known as Tenn-Tom — a channel lined with nature trails, marinas, and campgrounds on its 234-mile journey to the Gulf.

It is served by the Golden Triangle Regional Airport between the cities of West Point and Starkville.