Qualla: Laurel, Mississippi

Laurel, Mississippi: Introduction

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Quentin Melson, CC BY-SA 4.0. The town's original name was a misspelling. In 1882, when the Post Office Department asked sawmill operators John Kamper and A.M. Lewin to name the lumber camp growing around their mill on the New Orleans and Northeastern Railroad, they submitted "Lawrell" -- an homage to the mountain laurel thickets covering the surrounding hills. Federal officials corrected the spelling without asking, and Laurel, Mississippi got its name from a bureaucrat's red pen. It was an inauspicious beginning for a town that would, within four decades, ship more yellow pine lumber than any other place on Earth. Today Laurel is better known for the architectural legacy those timber fortunes built -- a historic district so grand that HGTV chose it as the setting for Home Town, the renovation series that turned a fading lumber town into a destination.

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Image: Quentin Melson | CC BY-SA 4.0

Laurel, Mississippi: The Iowa Barons of the Piney Woods

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown authorUnknown author or not provided, Public domain. Laurel's first decade was rough. Kamper's primitive sawmill struggled, and by 1891 his company teetered on bankruptcy. He sold the mill and more than 15,000 acres to Lauren Chase Eastman and brothers George and Silas Gardiner -- lumber barons from Clinton, Iowa, who saw opportuni...

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Image: Unknown authorUnknown author or not provided | Public domain

Laurel, Mississippi: Broad Avenues and Timber Mansions

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Michlaovic, Public domain. The wealth generated during Laurel's timber era, roughly 1893 to 1937, produced one of Mississippi's most remarkable architectural districts. The Eastman and Gardiner families laid out the city with broad avenues and named streets echoing their Iowa hometown. They built homes who...

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Image: Michlaovic | Public domain

Laurel, Mississippi: Darkness in the Piney Woods

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Xnatedawgx, CC BY-SA 3.0. Laurel's history is not all architectural charm. The city was the site of some of Mississippi's most painful racial episodes. In 1942, Howard Wash, a forty-five-year-old African-American man convicted of murder, was dragged from the county jail and lynched by a mob. In 1951, Will...

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Image: Xnatedawgx | CC BY-SA 3.0

Laurel, Mississippi: From Blanche DuBois to Home Town

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Xnatedawgx, CC BY-SA 3.0. Laurel has lived in the American imagination longer than most small towns. Tennessee Williams set his fictional character Blanche DuBois as a native of Laurel in A Streetcar Named Desire -- a woman haunted by the ghosts of a faded Southern past, fleeing to New Orleans with delusi...

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Image: Xnatedawgx | CC BY-SA 3.0