New Book about North State Street, Jackson

I noticed on the Arcadia Publishing webpage that a new Images of America book is coming out later this month focusing on North State Street in Jackson. Its author is Todd Sanders, an architectural historian with the Mississippi Dept. of Archives and History and the teacher of the architectural history class at Millsaps I posted about earlier in the week. For those unfamiliar with the Images of America series, they are medium-sized paperback books that specialize in compiling pictures on a historical topic from many different collections and with solid tidbits of information in the captions. They don’t pretend to be the final scholarly word on the topic, but they almost always introduce new archival material into the research pool.

Vestiges of North State Street’s former grandeur still remain in the four houses just north of First Baptist (which are listed on the National Register), in the line north of First Presbyterian in Belhaven, the old First Christian Church and First Presbyterian Church, as well as a few scattered grand houses in between, but at one time, this was the premier residential street in Jackson and boasted many antebellum houses. It’s exciting to see a whole book of photographs, hopefully many that have been collected from individuals and obscure sources, devoted to the street, and maybe people will realize how much we’ve lost in Jackson and work to preserve the remaining landmarks.

Stay tuned for more information on this one!