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May 2007 • Volume 27 • Number 5 • The Meeting Professional

Lighting the Way

Your Spotlight on Mississippi

By Chad Miller

A light illuminates Mississippi and lights it as nowhere else. It is an old light, a light heavy with history, and when it strikes anything—a magnolia tree or kudzu vine, a Bluesman’s shack or memorial—it saturates it and we see something anew, in vibrancy. Colors swell and explode in Mississippi’s light and offer a rare sight, affording vision and creating visionaries.

Mississippi’s history is replete with such men and women, gifted natives who changed fiction and music and art forever—William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Robert Johnson, R.L. Burnside, Robert Clay, Alice Mosley and more. It is a land rich and swollen with art. Retaining its heritage, it spawns the radically new.

TUPELO, OXFORD AND CLARKSDALE
As birthplaces are concerned, do not miss Elvis Presley’s. Tupelo keeps Elvis’ birth home—a shotgun, two-room house on its original lot—in what is now Elvis Presley Park. The Elvis Presley Museum, also in the park, houses a biography in artifacts collected by a Tupelo native and friend of the entertainer.

Elvis’ own suggestion for the park, the Memorial Chapel, adds a simple beauty and grace. Planners can rent a pavilion that accommodates up to 175 on lush grounds, tour the humble home and museum and sing along with a gospel choir in the chapel. If you sight a young Elvis with a guitar, do not doubt yourself. The life-sized statue commemorates Tupelo’s hero when he left with his family for Memphis at 13.

West of Tupelo, the University of Mississippi in Oxford became the state’s first public university in 1841, and today, situated among the magnolias and wisteria, it thrives as a cultural hub.

The university town cherishes Mississippi’s rich and artistic past, and by doing so, it continues to foster and nurture new talent. The university’s J.D. Williams Library houses the world-renowned Music and Blues Archive, as well as the William Faulkner Room. Authors Barry Hannah and John Grisham both live in Oxford to write in Faulkner’s shadow today, and on Oxford’s small stages, bands such as Widespread Panic, the Cooters and the Black and Whites played their first licks in the area.

The university also offers meeting spaces for moderately sized groups. The 130-year-old Ole Miss Oxford Depot, restored in 2003, accommodates up to 60, and the E. F. Yerby Conference Center holds up to 140 and includes five breakout rooms.

Transportation services are available throughout the city, but much of Oxford is pedestrian friendly. Visit the historic downtown square for great grits or for hip bookstore Square Books. Faulkner’s home—a Greek Revival dubbed Rowan Oak—is quite the sight upon approach. Situated behind cedars and hardwoods, visitors walk up the loud, gravel drive, announcing themselves long before seeing their destination. It is open to the public and offers a map of Oxford as it lay in Faulkner’s novels and the fictional county he named Yoknapatawpha.

West of Oxford in the delta of the Mississippi River, adventurous and historically minded planners can lodge in Clarksdale’s Shack Up Inn. This remnant of the working Hopson Plantation includes authentic sharecropper shacks for rent and meeting space in its Commissary, where the blues play nightly. It accommodates up to 125 in its main room and up to 40 on the back porch.

JACKSON AND CANTON
Mississippi’s capital Jackson, in the state’s heart and river regions, offers an urban environment for planners. Located at the crossroads of interstates 55 and 20, it is home to more than 425,000 residents and is Mississippi’s most populous city. It was originally named LeFleur’s Bluff after Louis LeFleur, a French-Canadian explorer who established a trading post on the Natchez Trace trail.

Today, Jackson is home to a variety of dining options, a vibrant nightlife and a range of attractions to suit every taste, such as the Eudora Welty House, which leads visitors through a tour of the author’s home, garden and writing space for 75 years.

For large-scale events, Jackson has the recently opened, 74,000-square-foot Mississippi Telecommunications Conference & Training Center. And by late 2008, the Capital City Convention Center will stand alongside the center, offering the heart that every great American city requires.

“The Capital City Convention Center will help us create a much-needed focal point for commerce, culture and recreation, and it is an essential component in our long-range plans for revitalizing downtown Jackson,” said Frank E. Melton, Jackson’s mayor.

North of Jackson in Canton, Mississippi becomes Hollywood.

“Canton is the real southern backdrop for Hollywood,” said Jo Ann Gordon, executive director of the Canton Movie Museums. “We are built on one of the most well-preserved squares in the state of Mississippi, and all of the buildings are as they were in the 1800s.”

A Time to Kill; O Brother, Where Art Thou; and The Rising Place were filmed entirely on location in Canton. The museums offer space for meetings and staff can coordinate tours and receptions with the Canton Welcome Center.

For larger meetings, Gordon recommends Canton’s newest banquet and meeting space, the Grand Olde Post Office. This is the original post office built on the square in 1910. It has been renovated to accommodate groups of up to 400.

GULFPORT AND BILOXI
Gulfport lost a considerable amount of infrastructure to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Its golf and gambling resorts were all but destroyed. Mississippians, however, are resilient and dedicated to growth.

When in Gulfport, visit the Magnolia Plantation Hotel. Situated in the wooded hills that slope to meet the coastal plains, the plantation survived Hurricane Katrina. Check in and try its complimentary Plantation Rum Punch. Take your teatime in true Southern style before your tee time. Relax at the pool, Jacuzzi or fitness center between meetings.

Biloxi’s beachfront is directly on the Gulf of Mexico northeast of Gulfport. Without levees or seawalls, Hurricane Katrina blasted the city, slamming casino barges inland, tearing down economically crucial resorts and robbing Biloxi of some of its points of interest. But Biloxi is rebuilding, and it’s rebuilding with planners in mind.

The Mississippi Coast Coliseum & Convention Center—scheduled to break ground on a 250,000-square-foot expansion just prior to Katrina—reopened in 2006 after extensive damage, with the expansion still planned to open in 2009.

A considerable loss to Biloxi was the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art. Designed by the legendary architect Frank Gehry, the museum housed the works of Biloxi’s own Mad Potter—George E. Ohr. He glazed par none, critics of the day said. But like a true eccentric and visionary, Ohr left glaze altogether and concentrated on form alone. Temporarily housed at the historic Glenn L. Swetman House, Ohr’s thin clay urns, wiry handles and twisted shapes were the best match for Gehry’s eccentric and lively architecture. Gehry returned without hesitation to head the museum’s rebuild, scheduled for completion later this year.

To see Biloxi, take the train tour that starts at the famous Biloxi Lighthouse. Locals call it the Shrimp Train, and for 40 years the two-car-hitched procession has guided tourists through Biloxi’s Historical District. Celebrate what has endured in Biloxi. Take hope in the Katrina Memorial as it stands to the height of the storm surge—12 feet—at the Town Green or the Ancient Oaks that survived the Tullis Toledano Manor. The oaks’ limbs are thin and new and now offer less shade, but their tall trunks and deep roots, like Biloxi and its people, are unrootable.  TMP

CHAD MILLER is a freelance writer based in Euless, Texas.

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Destination Details

GETTING STARTED
Jackson CVB
www.visitjackson.com

Mississippi Development Authority
www.visitmississippi.org

Mississippi Gulf Coast CVB
www.gulfcoast.org

Oxford CVB
www.oxfordcvb.com

Tunica CVB
www.tunicamiss.org

MISSISSIPPI BY THE NUMBERS

Tupelo-Oxford-Clarksdale
Rooms: 3,000
Prominent Meeting Facilities

  • Tupelo Furniture Market (100,000 sq. ft.)
  • Bancorp South Arena (32,000 sq. ft.)
  • Oxford Conference Center (25,000 sq. ft.)
  • Lee County Agri-Center and Entertainment Complex (15,000 sq. ft.)
  • Bancorp South Conference Center (10,000 sq. ft.)
  • Downtown Oxford Inn and Suites (2,000 sq. ft.)

Jackson-Canton
Rooms: 7,500
Prominent Meeting Facilities

  • Mississippi State Fairgrounds Complex (110,000 sq. ft.)
  • Mississippi Telecommunications Conference & Training Center (74,000 sq. ft.)
  • Jackson Marriott Downtown (35,000 sq. ft.)
  • Mississippi Coliseum (25,450 sq. ft., 6,500 seats)
  • Jackson Hilton (25,000 sq. ft.)
  • Old Capitol Inn (10,000 sq. ft.)
  • Cabot Lodge Millsaps (3,300 sq. ft.)
  • Duncan Gray Center (1,800 sq. ft.)
  • Thalia Mara Hall/City Auditorium (2,500 seats)

Gulfport-Biloxi
Rooms: 12,000
Prominent Meeting Facilities

  • Mississippi Coast Coliseum & Convention Center (180,000 sq. ft.)
  • Beau Rivage Resort & Casino (50,000 sq. ft.)
  • IP Casino Resort Spa (18,000 sq. ft.)
  • Hollywood Casino Bay St. Louis (17,000 sq. ft.)
  • Grand Casino Islandview Hotel (16,500 sq. ft.)

WHAT’S NEW IN MISSISSIPPI

  • Similar to Beale Street in Memphis, Tenn., Jackson’s Farish Street is billed as the city’s new entertainment district. Currently under development, it is expected to be fully operational by the end of the year.
  • The Mississippi Museum of Art ’s newly renovated facility at the Mississippi Arts Pavilion in Jackson opens in June and is available for events.
  • Biloxi’s Bacaran Bay Casino Resort broke ground in 2006 and is expected to open in fall 2008. The resort will feature an 18-hole golf course, 585,000 square feet of retail and entertainment space, a 125,000-square-foot gaming floor, 104,000 square feet of convention space and a marina.
  • The Mississippi Coast Coliseum & Convention Center in Biloxi plans a 250,000-square-foot expansion and renovation with an anticipated opening date in 2009.