Mississippi's ghost towns were mostly left behind by rivers and roads. The richest were cotton ports on the Mississippi: Rodney came within three votes of becoming the state capital in 1817, and Grand Gulf had almost 1,000 people in 1854. Both were hit in the Civil War and then stranded when the river moved west. Others grew up along the Natchez Trace, like Rocky Springs, home to 2,616 inhabitants plus about 2,000 enslaved people in 1860, and Old Greenville, the Jefferson County seat until 1825. Railroads finished off river and county-seat towns that they missed, from Cotton Gin Port on the Tombigbee, emptied when the railroad built Amory nearby, to Holmesville, bypassed by the Illinois Central in 1857.
In the longleaf pine country of south Mississippi, sawmill towns lasted as long as the virgin timber, and the boom ended around 1930. Logtown's big mill closed that year. Then the space age took what was left on the lower Pearl River: after NASA chose the site in 1961, Gainesville, Logtown, Napoleon, Santa Rosa and Westonia were emptied by the fall of 1963, 660 families in all, for what is now Stennis Space Center and its 125,000-acre acoustic buffer zone.
At the best-known sites, what survives is mostly churches and cemeteries. Rodney's 1832 brick church and Rocky Springs' 1837 church still stand, and Grand Gulf's cemetery and forts are in a state park. At Old Greenville only the cemetery is left, and at Pigeon Roost nothing remains but a Parkway exhibit.
Abandoned 
