Toward the end of my summer vacation, my grandfather decided to take a day and drive to Leakesville. I went with him, and probably as much for me as anything else, he agreed to stop in some of the little towns that we came to along the way. We headed up Highway 49 to Brooklyn, Mississippi near Hattiesburg, and then continued along Highway 98 to New Augusta, the county seat of Perry County. I remember that we drove across the Leaf River to Old Augusta, where nothing remained but the former jail. The town had been abandoned in 1906 when the railroad came south of the town, and everyone had moved to New Augusta. In McLain, there were several abandoned schools which I photographed, and in Beaumont I took a picture of the main street of town along the railroad tracks. But in Leakesville, we visited an old home that had belonged to some of our relatives, and the local Presbyterian Church. One of the strangest things I noticed about Leakesville was that the Greene County Courthouse sat in a square that only had buildings and two sides, with the other sides being woods, as if the town was never really quite complete. Leakesville was in fact a really small town, but was bigger than State Line, which was the last place we visited on the line between Mississippi and Alabamz. As I recall, we headed down to Moss Point and Pascagoula from there, and then back to Gulfport.
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