Opened in 1910 as the Mississippi Normal College, the state’s first legislatively funded institution for teacher education became the Mississippi Teacher’s College in 1924, the liberal arts Mississippi Southern College in 1940, and finally the University of Southern Mississippi in 1962. Hattiesburg was selected as the site for the normal school when the city and local citizens, including physician T. E. Ross and lumberman Judson Jones Newman, donated services, cutover timberland, and cash as incentives. Chattanooga architect R. H. Hunt, with St. Louis landscape architect George E. Kessler, developed the campus master plan, which called for a streetcar station (demolished) on Hardy Street and two rows of buildings facing one another with an administration building and an auditorium in a green space between.
Seven of Hunt’s first nine buildings, many built between 1912 and 1922 by I. C. Garber of Jackson, survive. Generally Colonial Revival in style, all of these hipped-roofed brick structures are decorous, with brick quoins and ample classical porticos sheltering their entrances. The ensemble is altogether less assertive than Hunt’s buildings at the originally all-male Mississippi State University (CH17). Kessler’s irregular-shaped lake to the south and the live oak trees enrich the campus. Many live oaks at the entrance were destroyed in a February 2013 tornado and have since been replanted.
Beginning in 1927, Gulfport architect Vinson B. Smith, working with Hattiesburg contractors Oden and Glenn, undertook to fill Hunt and Kessler’s green space as intended. Smith’s domed Administration Building (1928–1929), a Greek-cross design with four porticos projecting from an octagonal core, is today the university’s architectural symbol. Behind it, the Bennett Auditorium and The Hub (originally a dining hall) are works of Beaux-Arts classicism with round-arched windows and brick quoins like those on Hunt’s buildings.
Modernist buildings from the institution’s post-World War II boom include the McCain Library and Archive (1976, Biggs and Weir), a Brutalist structure in precast concrete with a brick base, and two brick-and-concrete dormitories, Pulley Hall (1962, William R. Allen), and a more elaborated version on the same model, Wilber Hall (1962, Landry and Matthes). The planar brick walls of the Thames Polymer Science Research Center (1991, Eley Associates with Canizaro Cawthon Davis) appear as a taut skin stretched over its reinforced-concrete frame.