August 21, 2026: Laurel (Mississippi) Histories: Cultural Connections

[We all need comfort texts in 2026, and for my wife and I one of our most surprising finds has been the delightful home renovation show Home Town. The show is deeply tied to its historic community of Laurel, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Laurel histories, leading up to a special weekend tribute to what makes Home Town so special!]

On three very distinct and equally telling places where Laurel shows up in cultural works.

1. A Streetcar Named Desire (1947): Laurel is the hometown of two of the protagonists of Tennessee Williams’ play, the sisters Stella and Blanche DuBois, who grew up on the family estate (formerly a slave plantation) Belle Reve just outside of town. That fact reminds us that long before Laurel became an incorporated lumber town, it was home to such sites of enslavement, the region’s and state’s primary industry before those post-war, New South changes. Moreover, since it is Blanche’s loss of the estate which has pushed her away from Laurel and toward her sister (and her brute of a husband) in New Orleans, the play has a good deal to say about those ongoing changes to such Southern communities, and their unexpected effects for the descendants of the first families of (white) Mississippi in particular.  
2. “Goin’ Down to Laurel” (1978): The first track on Alive on Arrival, the debut album from Mississippi-born singer-songwriter Steve Forbert, “Goin’ Down to Laurel” is mostly a song about young love and youthful optimism that could be set anywhere (and likely uses Laurel specifically as it was a town separate from but nearby to Forbert’s hometown of Meridien). But the final verse takes a strikingly and I would argue tellingly different tone: “Please don’t mention rain/Please don’t talk of trains/Please don’t mention buildings burning down/Everybody here seems to like to laugh/Either step in time or just don’t hang around.” As I’ve traced throughout this week’s series, Laurel has its share of the kinds of horrific histories that we can find everywhere in the South (and of course in the nation as well), and I think Forbert here quite potently captures what is required of young people if they’re going to live, laugh, and love in such communities.
3. Cleveland Payne’s books (1988-present): I really love that hyperlinked 2022 Black History Month story on Payne from WDAM, Laurel’s local news station, and don’t have much to add to its specifics about this local product turned author of 18 books (as of 2022!), across multiple genres. I also really love that his first book, The Oak Park Story: A Cultural History (1988), focused on the story of his vocational high school and its importance to the town’s Black community. And I’m likewise a big fan of that story’s last detail, that Payne’s books can be purchased at a kiosk inside Sawmill Square Mall in Laurel. I know it’s just a symbolic name for a shopping center, but it nonetheless links Laurel’s 19^th century lumber origins to this late 20^th and 21^st century author who is keeping those town histories very much alive—and doing so from the African American perspective that, as I traced in the week’s early posts, has sometimes been left out of how we remember places like Laurel.

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think?