Port Gibson’s compact downtown extends primarily along Market Street and retains a few buildings that survived a fire in 1839. Planter’s Hotel (c. 1817; 405 Market), a side-gabled, three-story stuccoed-brick building is Mississippi’s oldest surviving hotel. Its third-story cast-iron balcony is mid-nineteenth century.
The cubic Greek Revival courthouse (1845; 410 Market) was remodeled and enlarged in a Beaux-Arts classical mode in 1903 by Andrew J. Bryan and M. T. Lewman and Company with a pedimented entrance pavilion and a dome and cupola on a three-tiered octagonal drum. In front on a grassy traffic island, a Confederate soldier on a tall shaft (1907) was manufactured by Columbus Marble Works.
Two unassuming buildings played a large role in the state’s civil rights history. In the 1960s, the Piggly Wiggly grocery store occupied a late-nineteenth-century building at 505–507 Market. The store’s refusal to hire African Americans sparked the opening of Our Mart, a grocery store operated by African Americans in a converted service station (c. 1925; 602 Market). This, the first black-owned business on Market Street, supported a boycott (1966–1977) of white businesses by providing African Americans an alternative. The long boycott sparked a thirteen-year lawsuit that ended in 1982 at the U.S. Supreme Court, which affirmed the right of citizens to employ economic boycotts.
At 606 Market Street, the brick two-story Harriet Person Memorial Library (c. 1840) was built as a duplex and rehabilitated in 1994 by Belinda Stewart Architects for the public library. Port Gibson’s most intact Federal-style commercial building is a three-bay two-story building (c. 1820; 617 Market) with Flemish bond brick-work, jack arches, and a dentiled brick cornice. At 702 Market, a giant-order Doric colonnade dominates the facade of the former Port Gibson Bank (1840); the windows have been altered.