I taught history for a living before I retired in 2018, and I have spent a good chunk of the years since walking the ground I used to lecture about. Mississippi rewards that kind of travel. The state carries the weight of two American stories that are hard to separate from the land itself, the Civil War and the long struggle for civil rights, and you can stand in the actual rooms where both unfolded.
What follows is my ranked list of 15 historic places in Mississippi, counted down to the one I would send you to first. Some are run by the National Park Service, others by the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, and a few are kept up by cities or private families. I have tried to be honest about who manages what and what you will actually find when you arrive.
A quick word on the two subjects that ask the most of a visitor here. The civil rights sites and the Indigenous mound at Emerald deserve to be approached with care and accuracy, so I have done my best to get the names, dates, and people right. Let’s get started.
Historic Sites In Mississippi At A Glance
| Site | Designation | Managed By | Where |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vicksburg National Military Park | National Military Park | National Park Service | Vicksburg |
| Shiloh NMP (Corinth Unit) | National Military Park | National Park Service | Corinth, MS |
| Medgar & Myrlie Evers Home | National Monument | National Park Service | Jackson |
| Natchez National Historical Park | National Historical Park | National Park Service | Natchez |
| Elvis Presley Birthplace | Museum | Nonprofit / City of Tupelo | Tupelo |
| Tupelo National Battlefield | National Battlefield | National Park Service | Tupelo |
| Brices Cross Roads | National Battlefield Site | National Park Service | Baldwyn |
| Mississippi Civil Rights Museum | State museum | MDAH | Jackson |
| Old Capitol Museum | National Historic Landmark | MDAH | Jackson |
| Biloxi Lighthouse | Historic lighthouse | City of Biloxi | Biloxi |
| Emerald Mound | National Historic Landmark | National Park Service | Stanton |
| Waverley Mansion | National Historic Landmark | Private | West Point |
| Windsor Ruins | Mississippi Landmark | MDAH | Port Gibson |
| L.Q.C. Lamar House | National Historic Landmark | City of Oxford | Oxford |
| Natchez Historic District | Historic district | Local / private | Natchez |
15. Natchez “On Top Of The Hill” Historic District
We start in Natchez, the oldest permanent settlement on the Mississippi River and a town that wore its cotton wealth on its sleeve. The “On Top of the Hill” district sits on the bluff above the river and holds one of the densest collections of antebellum architecture in the country, with homes like Stanton Hall, Longwood, and Rosalie still standing.
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That wealth came from cotton and from the people who were enslaved to grow it, and the better house tours in town now say so plainly. Walk the streets, tour a home or two, and pair the visit with the Natchez Museum of African American History and Culture for the fuller picture.
14. L.Q.C. Lamar House Museum
In Oxford you will find the home of Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar, who is one of the more complicated figures in 19th century American politics. He served the Confederacy, then came back to Washington as a U.S. representative and senator, served as Secretary of the Interior under Grover Cleveland, and finished on the U.S. Supreme Court. John F. Kennedy singled him out for a chapter in Profiles in Courage.
Lamar built the house in 1869, and it is now a National Historic Landmark interpreted by the city of Oxford. Admission is free and it generally opens Friday through Sunday in the afternoon, so check the current hours before you drive out. The exhibits walk you through his career and through Oxford during Reconstruction.
13. Windsor Ruins
Near Port Gibson stand 23 Corinthian columns in an open field, all that remains of the largest antebellum mansion ever built in Mississippi. Smith Coffee Daniell II finished the house in 1861, lived in it a matter of weeks before he died, and the family held it until a guest dropped a lit cigarette into carpenters’ debris on February 17, 1890. The fire took everything but the columns.
The Magruder family donated the site to the state in 1974, and the Mississippi Department of Archives and History looks after it today. It is a Mississippi Landmark and on the National Register of Historic Places. MDAH finished a stabilization project here in 2023 and added an accessible trail around the columns, so it is in better shape now than it has been in decades.
12. Waverley Mansion
Colonel George Hampton Young built Waverley near West Point in 1852 and named it after the Walter Scott novel. The house is best known for its octagonal cupola and a pair of self-supporting curved staircases that seem to float up from the entrance hall. It was named a National Historic Landmark in 1973.
After the last of the Young sons died in 1913, the house sat empty for nearly 50 years until Robert and Donna Snow bought it in 1962 and began a long restoration. Waverley is still privately owned and is open for tours, which is worth knowing before you go since hours can change. You will also see the spelling “Waverly” around town, but the landmark name carries the extra “e.”
11. Emerald Mound
Just off the Natchez Trace Parkway near Stanton sits the second-largest mound from the Mississippian period anywhere in the United States, behind only Monks Mound at Cahokia in Illinois. It covers about eight acres and rises 35 feet, and you can climb a path to the top of the platform where a temple once stood.
The people who built it belonged to the Plaquemine culture, the ancestors of the historic Natchez, and they used it as a ceremonial center from roughly 1200 to the 1730s. The mound is a National Historic Landmark, and the National Park Service administers it as part of the Natchez Trace Parkway. There is no entrance fee, and the quiet up top is part of the experience.
10. Biloxi Lighthouse
The Biloxi Lighthouse went up in 1848 as one of the earliest cast-iron lighthouses in the South, and it has become the symbol of the city. It is also a monument to endurance. It has ridden out hurricane after hurricane, including Camille in 1969 and Katrina in 2005, when the storm surge swallowed everything around it and the tower still stood.
The light has a long history of women keepers, most notably Maria Younghans, who tended it for more than 50 years. The city of Biloxi owns the lighthouse today and offers short guided climbs in the morning, weather permitting, so it is worth calling ahead to confirm the schedule.
9. Old Capitol Museum
The Old Capitol in Jackson is the most historically loaded building in the state. Completed in 1839, this Greek Revival statehouse saw Mississippi pass the 1839 Married Women’s Property Act, vote to secede from the Union in 1861, and write the state constitutions of 1868 and 1890. It is a National Historic Landmark and one of the finest examples of Greek Revival public architecture in the country.
It is now a free museum run by the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, with exhibits on the legislature, the governor, and the courts, plus the building’s own restoration story after Hurricane Katrina damaged it. While you are there, look in on the Mississippi Hall of Fame, which honors figures from Eudora Welty to Medgar Evers to Choctaw chief Pushmataha.
8. Mississippi Civil Rights Museum
The Mississippi Civil Rights Museum opened in December 2017 as part of the Two Mississippi Museums complex in Jackson, and it does not flinch. Eight galleries trace the long fight for freedom in the state that was, by many measures, the hardest place in America to be Black, from slavery through the lynching era, the murder of Emmett Till, the Freedom Rides, Freedom Summer, and the voting rights battles that followed.
The centerpiece is a luminous, central gallery called “This Little Light of Mine” that brightens as more visitors gather, which is a quiet and effective piece of design. The museum is run by the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. Give yourself more time than you think you need, because the material asks you to sit with it.
7. Brices Cross Roads National Battlefield Site
Brices Cross Roads is one of the smallest units in the National Park System, a single acre near Baldwyn marked by a monument and a few cannon. On June 10, 1864, this is where Confederate cavalry under Nathan Bedford Forrest outmaneuvered and routed a larger Union force led by Samuel Sturgis, in what many historians regard as Forrest’s tactical masterpiece.
The National Park Service maintains the site, but the acre itself only tells part of the story. The nearby Brices Cross Roads National Battlefield Visitor and Interpretive Center, run by a local foundation, fills in the details and the wider campaign. Pair the two and the battle finally makes sense on the ground.
6. Tupelo National Battlefield
A month after Brices Cross Roads, Union forces came back into northern Mississippi with a single goal, to keep Forrest’s cavalry away from the rail line that supplied Sherman’s march on Atlanta. The fighting on July 14 and 15, 1864, ended without a clear winner on the field, but it kept Forrest off the railroad, which was the point.
Today Tupelo National Battlefield is a one-acre site on a city street, a monument and a couple of cannon administered by the National Park Service through the Natchez Trace Parkway. It is a quick stop rather than a half-day, but it is honest about what it is, and it pairs naturally with the other Tupelo stop on this list a few miles away.
5. Elvis Presley Birthplace & Museum
Elvis Presley was born in a two-room shotgun house in Tupelo on January 8, 1935, in a home his father built for around $180. That little house still stands, restored to how it looked in the 1930s, and it is the heart of a campus that has grown to include a museum, a chapel, and a bronze statue of Elvis at 13 with his guitar.
Whatever you make of his later fame, the contrast here is the story. He soaked up gospel, country, and the blues he heard from Black musicians in this part of Mississippi, then carried that mix to Memphis and reshaped American popular music. The site is run as a nonprofit in cooperation with the city of Tupelo, and it draws fans from all over the world.
4. Natchez National Historical Park
Natchez National Historical Park exists to tell the truth about how the cotton economy actually worked, and it does so across three units. The grandest is Melrose, the estate of attorney John T. McMurran, where the mansion, the formal grounds, and the surviving slave quarters all stand together so you can see the wealth and the labor that produced it side by side.
The William Johnson House preserves the home of a free Black barber and businessman whose detailed diary is one of the most remarkable firsthand records we have of daily life in the antebellum South. The third unit is the site of Fort Rosalie, the 18th century French post. The National Park Service runs all three, and together they make Natchez one of the most rewarding history stops in the state.
3. Medgar & Myrlie Evers Home National Monument
On the night of June 12, 1963, Medgar Evers pulled into his own driveway in Jackson and was shot in the back by a white supremacist as his wife and children waited inside. He was 37. As the NAACP’s first field secretary in Mississippi, Evers had spent years investigating racial violence and organizing for voting rights, work he knew could get him killed.
Myrlie Evers-Williams carried that work forward for decades, fought for more than 30 years until her husband’s killer was finally convicted in 1994, and later chaired the national NAACP. Their modest ranch home is preserved much as it was, and it was established as a National Monument on December 10, 2020, becoming the 423rd unit of the National Park System. The National Park Service offers tours, and it is among the most affecting places you can visit in Mississippi.
2. Shiloh National Military Park, Corinth Unit
A note up front, because the old version of this list got it wrong. The Shiloh battlefield itself, where Grant and the Confederates fought one of the bloodiest battles of the war on April 6 and 7, 1862, sits across the state line in Tennessee. The Mississippi piece of the park is the Corinth Unit, anchored by the Corinth Civil War Interpretive Center in Corinth, MS.
Corinth mattered enormously. Its rail crossing was one of the most strategically important points in the western Confederacy, which is exactly why both armies fought so hard for it in 1862. The interpretive center, opened in 2004 and run by the National Park Service as part of Shiloh NMP, covers both the Shiloh and Corinth campaigns and gives real attention to the thousands of freedom seekers who came to the Union lines here. It is one of the strongest Civil War interpretive stops in the state.
1. Vicksburg National Military Park
If I could send you to one historic site in Mississippi, it would be Vicksburg. The 47-day siege that ended on July 4, 1863, gave the Union control of the entire Mississippi River and split the Confederacy in two. Paired with Gettysburg, which ended the day before, it marked the turning point of the war. It also made Grant’s reputation.
The park itself is unusually moving to drive. The tour road winds for 16 miles past more than 1,300 monuments, markers, and cannon placed by the states whose sons fought here, with the domed Illinois Memorial standing out among them. The single best thing you will see is the USS Cairo, a Union ironclad sunk in 1862, raised from the Yazoo River a century later, and now sheltered in its own museum on the grounds.
The visitor center, the national cemetery, and the ranger programs are all first rate. Give it the better part of a day. Of everything on this list, this is the place where the scale of the Civil War, and the cost of it, lands hardest.
More Things To Do In Mississippi
My sons Will and Jim have spent their adult lives filming and exploring America’s national parks, working with the National Park Service, the Department of the Interior, the U.S. Forest Service, and others. In 2018, after a lifetime teaching history, I joined them to help tell the stories behind these places. That is the spirit this list was written in.
If you want to keep planning, here are a couple more of our Mississippi guides worth reading next.
- Mississippi National Parks, a closer look at the National Park Service sites across the state.
- Historic Sites In Alabama, for the civil rights and Civil War story just next door.
- Historic Sites In Georgia, if you are building a wider Deep South road trip.
