"I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it.” --William Faulkner

We’ve grown some fine stands of cotton in the Black Prairie soil of the Mississippi Hills. Our sweet potato harvest has always been second to none. Dairy cows grow fat feasting on our red clover, and our pine forests spread like a lush blanket over the gentle undulations of our warm, moist earth. Still, it isn’t just our trees or our agricultural gifts that we’re known for. No, what’s made us famous around the world is that year after year, in the cities and towns and tiny hamlets of our area, it’s always been a bumper crop in the Mississippi Hills when it comes to growing genius.

Just a partial roll-call would include not only Nobel laureate William Faulkner, but Tennessee Williams, America’s premiere playwright; Elvis Presley, the King of Rock and Roll and arguably the father of modern American popular culture; blues great Howlin’ Wolf; the First Lady of Country Music Tammy Wynette; best-selling phenomenon John Grisham; and the woman who can create a best-seller with a single word, the woman who’s known around the globe by a single name—Oprah.

That’s to name only a few, and only the cultural icons. Our social and political leaders have been equally impressive: Ida B. Wells, the courageous civil rights leader who battled lynching in the deep South, and whose portrait now hangs in Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government; L.Q.C. Lamar, Mississippi politician and U.S. Supreme Court Justice so admired by John F. Kennedy that he included him in his Profiles in Courage; Hiram Revels, the first African American to serve in the U.S. Senate; and James Meredith, the first African American to enroll in the University of Mississippi.

We made history, in civil rights and in the Civil War, as the Crossroads of the Confederacy and as the site of the largest siege ever conducted in the Western Hemisphere. We’re home to the nation’s first public university for women, Mississippi University for Women, and the second university founded for African Americans, Rust College. The Chickasaw and the Choctaw made their home here; Nathan Bedford Forrest made his name here. Eudora Welty went to school here; Davy Crockett raised horses here, and Andrew Jackson marched his army down the Natchez Trace. It was down our tracks Casey Jones drove his fateful train, and from our clouds Roscoe Turner flew his barnstorming plane into the pages of history.

And all of it happened right here, on a little patch of land, a “postage stamp of soil” hardly more 100 miles wide. Incredible but true.  But how? you may very well ask.