The domes of two capitols (JM12, JM16) piercing Jackson’s skyline establish the city’s purpose as the seat of Mississippi’s government. The capitols reigned in succession as Jackson’s tallest structures until the 1920s, when skyscrapers surpassed them, marking the city’s newfound commercial dominance. Although platted in 1822, Jackson is a twentieth-century city, retaining only a modest number of nineteenth-century buildings but boasting significant collections of Art Deco, Moderne, and International Style structures.
In 1822, after the 1820 Treaty of Doak’s Stand with the Choctaw opened up land for white settlement, the state legislature established Jackson as the capital. Sited on an ancient and inactive volcano on a bluff beside the Pearl River, Jackson’s topography is rolling, and its soil is infamous for its high concentrations of Yazoo Clay, which swells when wet and shrinks when dry and plays havoc with foundations and roadbeds.
The first railroad line to enter Jackson was the Clinton and Vicksburg Railroad in 1840. In 1858, the New Orleans, Jackson and Great Northern Railroad completed its north-south line that became part of the Illinois Central and today, as the Canadian National, remains a mainstay of Jackson’s economy. Railroads gave Jackson military significance in the Union campaign (1862–1863) to take Vicksburg, and the city changed hands three times between May and July of 1863, finally coming under General William T. Sherman’s occupation on July 18, 1863. Fortification lines in Battlefield Park and east of the University of Mississippi Medical Center and the name of Fortification Street recall this chaotic period when retreating Confederate and victorious Union forces caused much destruction.
By the early twentieth century, Jackson’s railroad hub brought it out of the shadow of the old river towns such as Vicksburg and Natchez, and the capital grew into the state’s economic, cultural, and population center. The growth of government during the Progressive Era made Jackson a natural headquarters for the state’s increasingly centralized businesses. Cotton oil mills built along the railroad, and banks and insurance companies established their state headquarters downtown. Their executives built houses in newly fashionable neighborhoods such as Belhaven and West Jackson. Industrial jobs attracted African Americans from agricultural regions, and they settled in the Farish Street neighborhood and in West Jackson. Between 1920 and 1980, the population grew from 22,000 to 202,000, and through annexation the city’s area expanded to over 100 square miles.
Even before it became the state’s architectural hub around 1910, Jackson was home to its largest building firm, the F. B. Hull Construction Company, established in the 1870s. Professional architects in the early twentieth century included Harry N. Austin (from Georgia), P. H. Weathers (from Memphis), Andrew J. Bryan (from Atlanta), and Jackson’s W. S. Hull. After Emmett J. Hull returned to Jackson in 1910 from his training in New York City, and N. W. Overstreet established his practice here in 1912, Jackson became the state’s center for architectural firms. This supremacy grew after World War II, when over twenty architectural firms called the capital home. Architectural Record took notice of the small city’s vibrant architectural climate in a September 1954 article, “Architectural Practice in Jackson, Miss.”
In the 1960s, Jackson became a center for civil rights activities when local African Americans, including college and high school students, took nonviolent direct action to protest long-established discrimination. This period is now being acknowledged and memorialized. The Medgar Evers Home (JM70) is a National Historic Landmark, and the Stringer Grand Lodge Building (JM65), the COFO building (see JM65), and the site of the Tougaloo Nine Read-In (see JM15) have all been named Mississippi Landmarks; a state Civil Rights Museum (JM14) is adjacent to the Museum of Mississippi History.
Jackson’s population declined from 202,000 in the 1980 census to 175,000 in 2010 as affluent and middle-class families both white and black relocated to surrounding suburbs. The resulting decline in the tax base has had far-reaching consequences for Jackson’s historic districts and buildings, several of which suffer from neglect. Nevertheless, Jackson’s many historic and contemporary buildings make it a center of architectural and cultural interest.
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