The state’s largest community college began as the Hinds County Agricultural High School (AHS). The four original buildings, probably all designed by Jackson-based Harry N. Austin, faced a semicircular drive, a typical AHS campus plan that imposed order on the rough agricultural landscapes many of the fledgling schools occupied. Austin’s functional buildings employed symmetrical massing with vaguely classical details. The only original building remaining today (end pavilions were added c. 1926) is the girls’ dormitory, Pickett Hall.
In 1926, the campus dropped high school classes and formally became Hinds Junior College. The neoclassical revival administration building, Cain Hall (1926, James M. Spain), at the center of the semicircular drive, burned in 1998 and was replaced by the much larger Cain-Cochran Hall (2002, Johnson Bailey Henderson McNeel Architects), a Postmodern interpretation of the original. The Moderne Denton Gymnasium (1927) is by James M. Spain. Increased enrollment after World War II resulted in three buildings (Jenkins, Harris Patrick, and Moss Cafeteria) constructed under Spain’s direction. The landscaped quadrangle created by these buildings established an orderly path for expansion to the north.
J. T. Liddle’s McLendon Library (1961; pictured above) achieves a feeling of lightness with its recessed base while the vertical cast-concrete panels firmly anchor it. The nearby student union (1964, George Lee Brock) resembles a modernist interpretation of a southern mansion with its peripteral, cantilevered second-story porch shaded by masonry screen panels and an aluminum and concrete double staircase. Masonry screens also line the full-length porches of Liddle’s 1959 dormitory, Marshall Hall. A growth spurt after 2000 brought new buildings—most designed by JBHM Architects—in a modernized Tudor Revival mode, with steeply sloped roofs, false chimneys, and brick walls.