Before the Civil War, interior Mississippi was largely undeveloped -- only properties along major rivers served as plantation land. The forests of longleaf pine that blanketed the southern part of the state were too dense and too far from markets to exploit. Railroads changed everything. In 1884, the New Orleans and Northeastern Railroad connected Meridian to New Orleans, passing directly through Hattiesburg. The Gulf and Ship Island Railroad soon followed, linking the Gulf port of Gulfport to the state capital at Jackson. Hattiesburg sat at the crossroads, and the lumber industry erupted. Sawmills processed the vast pine forests surrounding the town, sending timber south to ships and north to markets across the country. The Hub City had found its purpose, and its population boomed alongside the timber economy.

Hattiesburg's most consequential chapter was written not in commerce but in courage. By 1960, thirty percent of Forrest County's population was Black, yet less than one percent had been allowed to register to vote. County Registrar Theron Lynd used poll taxes, literacy tests, and comprehension exams -- all subjectively administered -- to bar African Americans from the ballot. In 1961, the U.S. Justice Department filed suit against him; he became the first southern registrar convicted under the Civil Rights Act of 1957. But the real breakthrough came on January 22, 1964 -- Freedom Day. Supported by student demonstrators and fifty northern clergymen, roughly 100 African Americans marched to the courthouse to register. For the first time since Reconstruction, an interracial protest picketed the courthouse for voting rights without a single arrest. When the courthouse closed that day, activists returned the next morning, and the next, in what became the Perpetual Picket -- a daily presence that lasted for months.

Even after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, white resistance in Mississippi was brutal. Vernon Dahmer, the most prominent Black leader in Forrest County and president of the local NAACP, had spent years fighting for voting rights. He announced publicly that he would pay the two-dollar poll tax for Black voters too poor to afford it. On the night of January 10, 1966, the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan attacked his home with firebombs and gunfire. Dahmer grabbed his rifle and held off the attackers long enough for his wife, their three young children, and his elderly aunt to escape the burning house. He died the next day from burns and smoke inhalation. His murder sparked large protest marches in Hattiesburg. Four Klansmen were eventually convicted, and in August 1998, after four earlier trials ended in deadlocks, KKK Imperial Wizard Samuel Bowers was convicted of ordering the assassination and sentenced to life in prison.

South of Hattiesburg lies Camp Shelby, the largest U.S. National Guard training base east of the Mississippi River, hosting up to 100,000 National Guardsmen and Reservists annually. During World War II, the base brought thousands of soldiers through the region, and a USO club was built in 1942 to serve African American troops, since local facilities were segregated. That building -- the only remaining USO club site in the United States -- now houses the African American Military History Museum, interpreting Black military service from the Revolutionary War through the Global War on Terrorism. Hattiesburg is also home to two universities: the public University of Southern Mississippi and the private William Carey University. The city's twenty-five-block Historic Neighborhood District, listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1980, contains one of the finest collections of Victorian-era houses in the state.

The Hub City has been tested by nature as well as by history. On February 10, 2013, an EF4 tornado formed west of Hattiesburg, tore across the University of Southern Mississippi campus, and carved a path of destruction through the city and neighboring Petal. More than 80 people were injured, but no one died -- a result attributed to the nearly thirty-minute lead time of the tornado warning. A second tornado, an EF3, struck on January 21, 2017, killing four and leaving 10,000 without power. Each time, the city rebuilt. Hattiesburg sits at the confluence of rivers, at the intersection of railroads, at the crossroads of history. It has been shaped by all of them.