Hattiesburg

Hattiesburg, a city and the county-seat of Forrest county, Mississippi, U.S.A., on the Hastahatchee (or Leaf) river, about 90 m. S.E. of Jackson. Pop. (1890) 1172; (1900) 4175 (1687 negroes); (1910) 11,733. Hattiesburg is served by the Gulf & Ship Island, the Mississippi Central, the New Orleans, Mobile & Chicago and the New Orleans & North Eastern railways. The officers and employees of the Gulf & Ship Island railway own and maintain a hospital here. The city is in a rich farming, truck-gardening and lumbering country. Among its manufactures are lumber (especially yellow-pine), wood-alcohol, turpentine, paper and pulp, fertilizers, wagons, mattresses and machine-shop products. Hattiesburg was founded about 1882 and was named in honour of the wife of W. H. Hardy, a railway official, who planned a town at the intersection of the New Orleans & North-Eastern (which built a round house and repair shops here in 1885) and the Gulf & Ship Island railways. The latter railway was opened from Gulfport to Hattiesburg in January 1897, and from Hattiesburg to Jackson in September 1900. Hattiesburg was incorporated as a town in 1884 and was chartered as a city in 1899\. Formerly the “court house” of the second judicial district of Perry county, Hattiesburg became on the 1st of January 1908 the county-seat of Forrest county, erected from the W. part of Perry county.

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