Time to book it.

Boardtown was the community’s first name because of the clapboards produced at a sawmill nearby, but in 1835, the city became Starkville to honor of Revolutionary War hero John Stark. It took an act of Congress, the Morrill Act in 1862, to get plans underway for a college, and in1880, under the presidency of former Confederate General Stephen D. Lee, Mississippi A & M College admitted its first student.

Over the next century, the college became a university, offering agricultural and engineering programs that took the lead in scientific advancement with cutting-edge programs of worldwide renown. The city grew, too, but kept its charming and laid-back college atmosphere even as it became a haven for high-tech startups, thanks to a high-energy town-gown collaboration with Mississippi State University.

A tour of the MSU campus should probably begin at the Mitchell Memorial Library where two collections in particular are worth a look—and a listen. In the John Grisham Room you can peruse literary manuscripts, signed photographs, international editions and even legislative files of this best-selling phenomenon. (Before he wrote novels, Grisham was a state legislator and wrote some pretty novel bills, like the resolution he introduced commending Tiny Tim!)

Elsewhere in the library, the Charles H. Templeton, Sr., Music Museum contains a collection of more than 200 self-playing musical instruments, 22,000 pieces of sheet music, 15,000 recordings and other items that make for a fascinating history of the music business since the mid-1800s.

From the library, it’s time to book it, with the wealth of fascinating explorations available only by appointment. At the Herzer Diary Science Cheese Factory you can get the scoop on the department’s famously delicious Edem cheese making operation, begun with hoops shipped out of Holland on the eve of World War II. Finish your tour with a sample of the ice cream and cheese for sale in the Cardwell Cheese Shoppe. And if you’d like some wine with that cheese, take the tour of the A. B. McKay Food Research and Enology Lab, where you’ll see, and taste if you like, how local muscadine grapes are transformed into healing quaffs of alcoholic and non-alcoholic libations. Bon appétite.

Today, with world’s oceans dangerously over-fished, environmentalists are looking to fresh-water farming, and in particular to MSU’s Aquaculture Research Center, for eco-friendly ways to feed the world and save the planet. Take a tour and get a glimpse of the future (hint: it has whiskers!)

From water world to cyber world, at MSU’s CAVE^tm, Computer Automatic Virtual Environment, engineering researchers are carrying out the latest in computational field simulation. Translation: when you take a tour you’ll get to play with some really cool virtual programs, like riding a virtual roller coaster or flying through a virtual forest.

Off campus, there are some cool places to roll through as well, in the downtown area that still offers the old Boardtown atmosphere in quaint shops and restaurants; you may want to stay overnight in the 1920s Hotel Chester.

The rest of Starkville’s historic districts are graciously and charmingly low-key, mostly dating from the early to mid-twentieth century, to which the Cotton District makes vivid exception. Once the site of small cotton mill shacks, the Cotton District is now one of the state’s most interesting examples of New Urbanism, with its vibrantly colored row houses evocative of New Orleans and Savannah.

Old and new blended so that each half complements the other—that’s the hallmark of this portion of the Mississippi Hills, true in Starkville and true in West Point, where a young man by the name of Chester Arthur Burnett was born. As a child, he would be forced to be loner, as an adult, he would become The Wolf.