Mount Olive, MS

Mount Olive is a Covington County town in Mississippi's Piney Woods, laid out around the Gulf and Ship Island Railroad in the late nineteenth century. A post office was already serving the area by 1858, but the railroad survey fixed the town's future when a depot was marked in the middle of a cornfield. The tracks were finished in 1899, and Mount Olive incorporated on May 18, 1900. The town was planned with a broad boulevard, later lined with oaks, giving its center a spacious shape unusual for a place that began as a rail stop.

Railroad traffic brought lumber, stores, a hotel, churches, a printing press, and a volunteer fire department into the new town. Today Mount Olive sits along U.S. Route 49, with Mississippi Highway 35 passing its southern edge and the Pascagoula watershed beginning in Okatoma Creek. Mount Olive Elementary and Mount Olive High School serve local families through the Covington County School District. The old railroad story still shapes the town's layout, but the oak-lined boulevard and Piney Woods setting give Mount Olive a character that is distinctly its own.