The southeastern quarter of Mississippi, known as the Piney Woods,
extends southward from Interstate 20 to within twenty miles of the Gulf
Coast, and from the Alabama line to the Brown Loam Belt west of the
Pearl River. It is a high rolling land, once covered by dense stands of
long-leaf pine, and patches of hardwood in the bottoms. Numerous rivers
and creeks criss-cross its sandy soil. The Leaf and Chickasawhay form
the Pascagoula River that empties into Pascagoula Bay. The Pearl River,
with its tributaries, the Strong and the Bogue Chitto, empties into the
Gulf of Mexico.
The Piney Woods, originally inhabited by the Choctaw Indians, was ceded
to the United States by a series of treaties beginning with the Treaty
of Mount Dexter in 1805. In the great migration after the War of 1812,
settlers began coming in by horseback, on foot, by wagon teams, moving
west across the Fort Stephens-Natchez road and the Three-Chopped Way and
down Jackson’s Military Road. They came by flatboat down the rivers, and
later by steamboat up the Pearl. They came from the Carolinas, Georgia,
and Tennessee to the land described by J. F. H. Claiborne in 1840 as
“covered exclusively with the long-leaf pine; not broken, but rolling
like the waves in the middle of the great ocean. The grass grows three
feet high and hill and valley are studded all over with flowers of every
hue.”