Hattiesburg, Mississippi: A Town Planned Over Lunch

Hattiesburg, Mississippi, is named for Hattie, the wife of railroad builder W. H. Hardy, who picked the town’s spot while eating lunch in the pine woods. He’d stopped to rest on a little hill, pulled out a map, drew a line with his pencil, and decided a city belonged where two railroads would cross.

A railroad through the pines

Hardy was a Confederate veteran practicing law in Paulding, in Jasper County, when he first dreamed up a railroad from Meridian to New Orleans in 1868. The state’s 1907 cyclopedia, edited by Dunbar Rowland, says a first survey was done in 1873, and then a financial panic froze the money. In 1879 Hardy revived the project as the New Orleans and North Eastern Railroad, and a new survey started in March 1880.

Hardy was the company’s vice president, and his job on the ground included “locating stations and naming them.” So naming stops was part of his job description.

The country he was working through was thin on people. Most of it, Rowland’s sketch says, was “an unbroken pine forest,” public land you could buy from the government office in Jackson for $1.25 an acre.

The lunch on Gordon’s Creek

Once the line was set through Perry County, Hardy went out to check on the survey crews at Black Creek. On the way back, he stopped at noon on “a little hill on the north side of Gordon’s Creek,” where a big oak and two hickories made a patch of shade. His only company, the sketch says, was a Black boy of about fifteen, whose name it doesn’t give.

After lunch he lit a cigar, spread a blanket on the ground, and opened a map of the state with the new railroad drawn on it. Hardy was thinking about the Gulf and Ship Island Railroad, an older plan to run a line to the harbor at Ship Island. He traced where he figured that road would go, and his pencil crossed the New Orleans and North Eastern “where the city of Hattiesburg now stands.”

Then comes the line the whole name hangs on: “He then and there decided to locate a station at that point and to secure the land (which was public) and lay out a city and name it in honor of his wife, whose name was Hattie.”

When the encyclopedia came out in 1907, it said the city hall stood on that little hill and “the oak still stands there.” The sketch isn’t signed, and it’s the only detailed telling of that lunch we found, so the cigar and the blanket rest on its word alone.

Who was Hattie?

The record on that is thin, and you’ll notice it. Henry Gannett’s 1905 federal book on American place names says the town was “named for the wife of Capt. W. H. Hardy, its founder.” The short biography of Hardy in Rowland’s book says he “founded Hattiesburg in 1882, and named it for his wife.” Neither one gives her last name or says anything else about her.

The sketch doesn’t put a year on the lunch, either. It comes after the survey that began in March 1880, Hardy’s biography says he founded the town in 1882, and a village of three or four hundred people grew up there in 1884 and 1885.

The crossing he drew came true

The New Orleans and North Eastern built a depot, an eating house and a roundhouse at Hattiesburg. The Gulf and Ship Island took longer. With Hardy as its president, it started grading south from Hattiesburg in January 1887, stopped in 1888 when the construction company ran into money trouble, and wasn’t finished until 1897, with a pier at Gulfport running 3,000 feet into Mississippi Sound.

You can see how it all worked out in the first line of the city’s entry in the 1907 encyclopedia, which places Hattiesburg “at the junction” of four railroads, the New Orleans and North Eastern and the Gulf and Ship Island among them. Gannett’s 1905 book still listed it as a town in Perry County. Two years later, Rowland was calling it “the capital of the new county of Forrest.” By then, the crossing Hardy penciled in over lunch was the first thing the encyclopedia had to say about the place.

Sources & further reading

• Dunbar Rowland, ed., Mississippi: Comprising Sketches of Counties, Towns, Events, Institutions, and Persons, vol. 1 (1907). The unsigned sketch “Hattiesburg” (pp. 849–851): the 1868 plan, the 1880 survey, “locating stations and naming them,” “an unbroken pine forest” at $1.25 an acre, the lunch on Gordon’s Creek, the cigar, blanket and map, “He then and there decided…,” “the oak still stands there,” the village of 1884–85, the Gulf and Ship Island dates, and “the capital of the new county of Forrest.” The entry “Hardy, W. H.” (p. 839): “He founded Hattiesburg in 1882, and named it for his wife.”
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (U.S. Geological Survey, 1905), p. 152. “Hattiesburg; town in Perry County, Mississippi, named for the wife of Capt. W. H. Hardy, its founder.”
• GNIS feature 691565 (U.S. Geological Survey). Location and county (Forrest) for Hattiesburg; the record says nothing about the name.