Mississippi Trivia & Tidbits - Page 17

Looking for Mississippi trivia? Try our list Mississippi little know facts, tidbits and trivia.

The former Pigeon Roost Road (now Highway 178) near Olive Branch (pop. 3,567) was named for the millions of the now-extinct carrier pigeons that nested along the Nonconnah River bottoms.

first appeared: 1/14/2001

The first free public school in the state, Franklin Academy, was founded in Columbus (pop. 22,600) in 1821.

first appeared: 1/7/2001

Mississippi College, in Clinton (pop. 21,992), was the first co-educational college in the United States to grant a degree to a woman.

first appeared: 12/31/2000

Leontyne Price of Laurel (pop. 18,500) was the first African American to achieve international stardom in the world of opera, performing with New York's Metropolitan Opera in 1961.

first appeared: 12/24/2000

More than 80 percent of the world’s supply of farm-raised catfish comes from Mississippi.

first appeared: 12/17/2000

The Waterways Experiment Station in Vicksburg (pop. 20,908) is the primary research laboratory of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. River, harbor, and flood control projects are studied there on scale models.

first appeared: 12/10/2000

Hurricane Camille's 200-mile-an-hour winds split Ship Island in two, creating East Ship and West Ship Islands in 1969.

first appeared: 12/3/2000

Pass Christian (pop. 5,557) was the site of the South’s first yacht club, founded in 1849. Six U.S. presidents have vacationed there: Andrew Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Zachary Taylor, and Harry S. Truman.

first appeared: 11/26/2000

The Pascagoula River, flowing through the town of the same name (pop. 25,899), makes a strange singing sound resembling a swarm of bees in flight. Scientists have said the sound could be made by fish, sand scraping the hard bottom of the river, or natural gas escaping from a sand bed—but the cause has never been proven. Legend has it that the tribe of Pascagoula Indians, realizing they could not win a battle with the Biloxi tribe, walked singing into the river to their death.

first appeared: 11/19/2000

Grenada (pop. 11,155) originally was founded as two towns by political rivals, but the two communities united in 1836. The union was symbolized by a wedding in which the bride came from one town and the groom from the other.

first appeared: 11/12/2000

The blues, a musical style native to the United States, traces its beginnings to the cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta. The University of Mississippi Blues Archive in Oxford contains the world’s largest collection of blues recordings.

first appeared: 11/5/2000

Jimmie Rodgers, of Meridian, is known as the “Father of Country Music.” He was the first person inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville, Tenn.

first appeared: 10/22/2000

Mississippi is home to the largest man-made beach in the world. The 26-mile, 200-foot-wide beach along the Mississippi Gulf Coast stretches from Biloxi to Henderson Point.

first appeared: 10/8/2000

The first human lung transplant was performed at Jackson’s University of Mississippi Medical Center in 1963. Dr. James D. Hardy led the surgical team.

first appeared: 9/24/2000

Edward Barq Sr. invented Barq’s Root Beer in Biloxi in 1898. Barq’s was one of the first companies to charge a nickel for a 12-ounce bottle —the same price that most other 6-ounce soft drinks cost.

first appeared: 9/10/2000

The Mississippi Petrified Forest in Flora is 36 million years old. In 1966, the National Park Service declared the forest—the only petrified forest in the eastern United States—a Registered National Natural Landmark.

first appeared: 8/27/2000

Memorial Day is said to have originated in Columbus. The town’s Friendship Cemetery is called the place “Where Flowers Healed a Nation.” On April 25, 1866, a year after the Civil War ended, some town women decorated Confederate and Union soldiers’ graves with flowers, starting a tradition soon known as Decoration Day.

first appeared: 8/13/2000

Burnita Shelton Matthews of Hazelhurst was the first female to serve as a U.S. federal district judge. She served from 1949 to 1983.

first appeared: 7/30/2000

Vicksburg was known as the Gibraltar of the Confederacy during the Civil War. The city, located high on the bluffs, was a fortress guarding the Mississippi River. After fighting a campaign from March 29, 1863, to July 4, 1863, the city surrendered to Union troops.

first appeared: 7/16/2000

THE WORLD?S ONLY KNOWN cactus plantation is near Edwards, Miss., where more than 3,000 varieties are grown.

first appeared: 7/2/2000

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