Blue Mountain, MS

Blue Mountain is a Tippah County town where the 2023 census counted 926 residents. It grew around Blue Mountain Female Institute, founded in 1873 by Mark Perrin Lowrey, and incorporated in 1877. The college became Blue Mountain College and was renamed Blue Mountain Christian University in 2022. Its campus remains the town's defining institution, a private Baptist liberal-arts university that began as a school for women and later became coeducational.

Mississippi Highways 2 and 15 meet in Blue Mountain, linking the town with Ripley, New Albany, and Hickory Flat. South Tippah School District serves local public-school students, while the university brings a separate educational presence and a long institutional memory. The town's name refers to the bluish morning hue of the surrounding hills, a regional detail that fits its location in southwestern Tippah County. Blue Mountain's map is therefore built around a college founded in Reconstruction-era Mississippi, two state highways, and a school system serving the surrounding rural area today.