Click the map above to see a more detailed map. This window will remain open. You may wish to use the larger map while reading the geographic descriptions below. When you are finished with the large map, simply close the map window. You should be returned to this window.
Mississippi is divided into four geographic regions. These four regions are further divided into several sub-regions that are defined by culture that has been directly influenced by the geology of the land. The four main regions and their sub-regions are:
These four regions each have their own history and pattern of settlement. Because of this, they each have their own cultural identities; some say they even have their own linguistic dialect. Even religious affiliation is different among these regions. And yet, the people of these regions fiercely identify as Mississippians.
Culturally, the Gulf Coast has more in common with the people of southern Louisiana and Alabama then they do with their fellow Mississippians in the interior of the state. That is because the Gulf Coast was settled by the French – before they founded either New Orleans or Mobile. Pierre LeMoyne, le Sieur d’Iberville, and his brother Jean Baptiste LeMoyne, le Sieur de Bienville, landed at what is now Ocean Springs in 1699, establishing a camp there that they called Biloxi. From Biloxi, d’Iberville sent his brother out to explore and make friendly contact with the natives. Thus, Biloxi became the first capital of Louisiana. This unique history has allowed the region to retain a French flair and joie d’vivre. The Coast’s French culture is detected in the place names of its cities and in the surnames of its citizens. Roman Catholicism is stronger along the coast than anywhere else in this overwhelmingly Protestant state. Mardi Gras is celebrated every year with as much enthusiasm as any party in New Orleans. And, if you listen carefully, you will detect that uniquely southern dialect known as the “9th Ward drawl” - a dialect most common in New Orleans – a southern version of the Brooklyn accent picked up along the wharves of the Mississippi River and Gulfport. The dominant geological features of the Gulf Coast are:
The coastal Terrace hugs the shoreline of the Gulf of Mexico. It is typical of the shoreline of the northern gulf coast. Along the coast itself is an extensive coastal estuary, one of the most extensive estuary systems in the United States. From this estuary, the land slopes upward for about 10-20 miles. The soil is sandy and supports a sparse forest of scrawny pines and grassy meadows. The rivers that empty into the Gulf, notably the Pearl River and the Pascagoula-Leaf-Chickasawhay River basin, cut into this sloping land for several miles inland. These valleys extend the coastal system well into the inland prairies. As the land of the Coastal Terrace is very sandy, agriculture never took root here. The sea however has provided the wealth of the people of this region. The main cities in the Coastal Terrace are Biloxi, Gulfport, Ocean Springs, Pascagoula, Bay St. Louis, and Pass Christian. When counting the total population of the string of cities that stretch along the coast between the Louisiana state line to the Alabama state line, the Gulf Coast is easily the most populated region of the state.
The Barrier Islands lie some 10 to 20 miles offshore. These islands consist of sand dunes that barely break the waves of the sea. They are generally only a half mile to a mile wide and several miles long. Marshy lagoons support diverse and delicate wildlife in the interior of these islands. The islands serve an important geological function. They protect the mainland from the ravages of sea weather, sparing the mainland the brunt of the frequent hurricanes that make landfall here. On the inland side of one of these islands – Ship Island – the LeMoyne brothers set anchor and rowed ashore to found the first settlement of the Lousiana colony. The islands are generally uninhabitated except for tourists, sun-worshippers, and sportsmen who arrive by boat for daylong excursions.
The culture of the Southern Prairies is relative new compared to the rest of the state. The dense forests of these prairies made travel through them difficult. As a result, the region really did not become populated until after the Civil War, though the first settlers arrived from the Carolinas and Georgia just prior to the War. These settlers were Irish immigrants who established small family farms in the sandy soil and small hamlets in clearings of felled trees. It took the advent of the railroad - made possible by the surveying project of Captain William Hardy, founder of both Hattiesburg and Gulfport - to open the area up for modern civilization. Today, high-tech industrial plants stand side by side with traditional farms. The people enjoy a laid-back lifestyle, free from many of the stresses of modern life. Hattiesburg, the major city of the region, is an educational and medical center for the entire state. To the dismay of many people not from the region, it has become a mecca for retirees looking for the quality of life and freedom of small town living mixed with culture and medical availability. The dominant geological features of the region are:
The Pine Belt is part of the wide coastal plain of North America. It sits on the Citronelle geological formation. The land is a gently rolling, densely forested prairie. The prairie is cut by the valleys of the Leaf-Chickasawhay-Pascagoula River System in the east and the Pearl River in the west. On these river bottoms grow the only large stands of hardwoods that may be found in the region. The soil is a mixture of sand and clay, and therefore is not conducive to large-scale agricultural development. However, the sandy soil is very conducive to longleaf and slash pines. These pines are part of a vast pine forest that stretches from eastern Texas to the Atlantic coast. These pines were harvested profitably for lumber at the turn of the 20th century, an industry that provided the majority of the wealth of this region before World War II. Beneath the land lies the second source of wealth for the Pine Belt: Petroleum. Since World War II, the petroleum industry surpassed the lumber industry as the main source of wealth. A secondary source of income for many residents of the Pine Belt is the poultry industry. Driving through the woods and pastures of the region, visitors will see rows and rows of very long tin-clad buildings known as long houses. In these houses, poultry raisers use modern technology to hatch, raise, and harvest millions of chickens that are processed in large processing plants in Laurel and Collins. The European-American residents of the Pine Belt are of Irish descent, and most of the African-American residents came to the area to work for the many saw mills that provided an alternative to sharecropping in the Delta. Most of the residents are Baptist, followed closely by Methodists, whose circuit-riding preachers traversed the thick forests easily on horseback during the 19th century. Generally speaking, old-time families who arrived during the antebellum years are Methodist. Newcomers who came to work in the lumber mills as laborers were Baptist, as are their descendents. The northerners who came to open the mills were largely Presbyterian and Episcopalian, as are their descendents. The main cities of the Pine Belt are Hattiesburg, Laurel, Columbia, McComb, Brookhaven, Picayune, and Waynesboro.
The Central Prairie - also known as the Jackson Prairie - lies on the Catahoula, Vicksburg, and Ackerman geological formations. It is the same prairie system as the Pine Belt, except that the land is less abundantly forested, with wide rolling grasslands that are easily converted to farmland. The land is also less sandy than that of the Pine Belt. As a result, the Central Prairie is the third most fertile farming region of the state. Cotton is traditionally the staple crop, though these have been replaced with soybeans and corn. Cattle is also pastured on large, rolling fields. Like their neighbors in the Pine Belt, the people are mostly of Irish descent, and worship in Baptist and Methodist churches. As with any of the three agricultural regions, the African-Americans residents worked on the cotton farms of the region, and today still work on the soybean farms. The difference is that today, many of them actually own the land that they till. The main cities of the Jackson Prairie are Jackson, Canton, Philadelphia, Morton, and Meridian.
The Delta is the traditional powerhouse region of Mississippi. Culturally, it is a region of extremes that is belied by the region’s unchanging, monotonous flat plains. It is the home of some of the richest people in the state, living a mere stone’s throw from some of the poorest. The richest are descended from English settlers who became part of the Old South’s aristocracy, the poorest from the slaves who labored on their plantations. It is the only region in the state where the African-American population is greater than the white population. White Deltans worship in Baptist, Methodist, and Episcopalian churches, while black Deltans worship in Pentecostal and other congregational churches. When non-Southerners think of Mississippi, it is the Delta that they usually visualize. Yet, these are old images that are thankfully fading into history. Today’s Delta is still a land of extremes, where diversity of people and diversity of industry are celebrated. This new image is still a bit blurry, but it’s quickly coming into focus. The two subregions of the Delta are characterized by geology:
The Mississippi-Yazoo River Basin is the most noticeable geographical feature of the state. Basically, the system is part of the alluvial plain of the Mississippi River. It encompasses the land on both banks of the Mississippi River in six states. The area was once a huge arm of the Gulf of Mexico that extended deep into the center of the North American continent. Over hundreds of thousands of years, the Mississippi River and its tributaries have deposited incomprehensible amounts of silt from the interior of the continent, slowly but surely building up land where the sea once lay. Every spring until very recently, the river has deposited this rich silt onto the land, providing some of the most fertile soil on the planet. That part of this system that lies within Mississippi extends the entire length of the state. Just south of Memphis, the plain fans out to a width of about 70 miles to encompass all of the land between the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers. This is the Mississippi-Yazoo River Basin, or the Delta, as it is commonly called. As the Yazoo travels southwestward to meet the Mississippi just north of Vicksburg, the plain also narrows to just a few miles from the river’s banks. The narrow strip of the alluvial plain traverses the remainder of the western border of the state, narrowing at some points to only a few hundred yards. The land is naturally covered in thick forests and swamps, but over the last two hundred years, man has cleared the forest and drained the swamp, leaving a vast open country of rich farm land. It is here, the fan-shaped Delta, that the wealth of the antebellum cotton empire was made, and where the greatest concentration of Africans languished in slavery. The effects of this unjust and inefficient labor system can still be seen today. It is ironic that some of the most squalid conditions of poverty in America has been experienced on some of the most fertile and rich land ever created by God. Yet, out of the despair and poverty evolved one of the few truly American art forms: the Blues. The Blues artfully portrayed the desperate situations of daily life on sharecropping tenements and plantation farms. Today, however, cotton is no longer king, its throne usurped by the catfish, tourism, and manufacturing industries. The main cities of the Delta are Greenville, Indianola, Greenwood, Cleveland, Clarksdale, and Tunica.
The Loess Bluffs border the Delta on its eastern edge, separating this broad plain from the hills and prairies that cover the rest of the state. They are made up of brown loam soil (Loess) that was windswept over millions of years into dune-like hills. The Loess formations of the Mississippi-Missouri basin can be found in only one other place in the world - China (though Loess is found all over the world, it is the formation that is unique). The Loess is extremely porous, and erosion is a major problem in the region. To combat the problem, conservationists in the 1930s imported a Chinese plant used in that country to contain the same Loess bluff formations found there - Kudzu. Today kudzu is a major annoyance, as it grows ANYWHERE and EVERYWHERE, and so fast that some people swear that you can actually see it growing. Where kudzu has not taken over, the Loess is extremely fertile, though not nearly as fertile as the alluvial soil of the Mississippi-Yazoo River Basin. Therefore, farming is a major industry. In the southwestern part of the state where the alluvial plain of the Delta narrows to a few hundred yards or more, the Loess Bluffs overlook the Mississippi itself, providing grand vistas of the river. Likewise, the same vistas overlook the Delta’s fan-shaped width, so that perched atop these hills one can look out upon the Delta’s flat plain for miles. Any traveller of Interstate 55 between Memphis and Jackson get to know the Loess Bluffs very well. This interstate traverses almost the entire length of the Bluffs before climbing down onto the Jackson Prairie just north of Canton. The Bluffs can best be seen along this route in Holmes and Carroll County, where they lay bare of trees, covered only with grassland that is used as cattle pastures. The great river cities of Natchez, Vicksburg, and Memphis (in Tennessee) were built upon these bluffs. Other cities of the Loess Bluffs include Yazoo City, Port Gibson, Grenada, and Batesville.
The people of the Northern Highlands have more in common with the people of the Appalachian regions of Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee that they do with those living along the Gulf Coast. This is because the Northern Highlanders came from the same stock of pioneers that crossed the Appalachians in the 18th and 19th centuries that settled the first states west of the mountains. Those pioneers were themselves a mixture of Irish, English, and Welsh immigrants. Because the land is generally poor, the people that lived upon it were just as poor, barely able to make a living off the rocky land. Appalachian “hillbilly” culture thrived in the Northeastern hills as much as it did in Tennessee and Alabama. Modern civilization arrived with electricity produced by the Tennessee Valley Authority in the 1930s. Today, modern industry is the wealth of this traditionally poor region. The Northern Highlands is the most geologically diverse of the four regions of the state. They geological regions include:
The Red Clay Hills lie on the Holly Springs, Grenada, and Lisbon geological formations. They are characterized by high rolling hills with deep, densely wooded ravines and river bottoms. These hills are the at the very edge of the Appalachian range, where the hills rise up from the plains to the south. The soil is of a red sandy clay, and therefore is not very fertile. In the river bottoms, however, small farming and pasturing of cattle can be modestly productive. Lumber provides the majority of the economic wealth of the region, where yellow loblolly and short leaf pine are grown and harvested. These forests, however, are not nearly as dense as those in the southern part of the state. The main cities of the Red Clay Hills are Holly Springs, Oxford, and Kosciusco.
The flatwoods is a very narrow strip of land extending from the Tennessee border to the Alabama border. It is made up of very sticky clay. As a result, few crops are profitably grown. Timber consists of deciduous groves of elm, oak, and gum. There are few cities in the Flatwoods because the region is so narrow, but a few of them are Ripley and Hickory Flat. Most of the people who live in the Flatwoods make their livings in the factories and businesses of the surrounding regions.
Snuggled along the eastern edge of the Flatwoods is a high ridge of hills separating the Red Clay Hills from the Black Prairie and the Northeastern Hills. The ridge is called the Pontotoc Ridge. The land on the ridge was once covered with a thin but fertile layer of topsoil, but cotton farming quickly depleted the topsoil’s fertility. Today, little profitable agriculture can be sustained in the region. Conservation measures by the state have spared the land from the ravages of erosion, and there is hope that the topsoil may be revived. However, no agriculture of a commercial level will ever be sustained here. The residents of the Pontotoc Ridge have recently relied on industry, particularly in furniture manufacturing to make their livings. As a result, the communities of Pontotoc and New Albany have become centers for this industry.
In the alluvial plain of the Tombigbee River lies the Black Prairie, the second most fertile region of the state. The Black Prairie is an extension of the Black Belt of western and central Alabama. The land is covered with rich black soil that gives the region its name. Cotton was grown extensively in this region, and was the site of large cotton plantations in the days before the Civil War. Today, it is still home to many of the descendents of the African slaves that labored on those plantations. The main cities of the prairie are Tupelo, Columbus, West Point, Aberdeen, Starkville, Okalona, and Macon.
In the extreme northeastern corner of the state are the Northeastern Hills, which are actually the foothills of the southwestern tip of the great Appalachian Range. The tallest of these hills is Woodall Mountain, all 800 feet of it, which stands as the highest point in Mississippi. The people of the Northeastern Hills are linked culturally with the people of middle Tennessee and western Alabama. The thin soil covers the rocky base of the Appalachian range, and has been able to sustain only minimal family farming. In the antebellum era, few of the white settlers could afford slaves, and had little need for them if they could. As a result, this region is home to the fewest number of African-Americans than any other part of the state. Today, modern industry provides income for many of the residents of the region. The people of the Northeastern Hills learned in a dramatic way the benefit of modern technology and the industries they produce when their lives were literally lighted up by the projects of the Tennessee Valley Authority. Since then, the people of the region have eagerly welcomed modern industry to their communities. In recent years, local, state, and federal authorities have lobbied the NASA program to invest some sort of facility in the region. Should they succeed, Iuka could become a space center associated with the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, AL. Some of the cities of the Northeastern Hills are Corinth, Iuka, and Booneville.
