THE MISSISSIPPI HILLS HERITAGE AREA
What Are Its Potential Functions?
Potential Thematic Tours; Existing Infrastructure; and

       Potential Infrastructure Projects
What Are the Region's Greatest Strengths?
Creating a Compelling Visitor Experience

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What Are Its Potential Functions?
The Mississippi Hills Heritage Area could serve as a valuable framework for:

1. Research, Interpretation, and Education
The heritage area would facilitate a broad range of assessment, interpretive, and educational activities.

a. Research:

Resource Inventory: catalogue known heritage resources and discover unknown resources, accomplished through various means, including oral history.

Community Assessment: evaluate current economic conditions and assess community capacity with regards to heritage tourism development. Measure perception and preferences for heritage tourists and evaluate communities through the eyes of visitors.

b. Interpretation:

Story Telling: interpret and share the histories of the region's peoples and communities through interpretive guidebooks, museums, films, brochures, etc.

Exploring Modern-Day Connections: examine the stories of today and how they connect to the past.

c. Education:

Educating Our Own: inform regional citizens regarding the richness and diversity of their heritage through, among various other means, the development of curriculum for grade schools and high schools.

Leveraging Existing Educational Resources: develop related programs in area community colleges, colleges, and universities.

2. Preservation, Conservation, and Enhancement
The Mississippi Hills Heritage Area would serve as a catalyst for preservation and enhancement of the historic, cultural, and natural resources that make the Mississippi Hills a distinct and identifiable region.

a. Preservation:

Preserving The Built Environment: this refers not only to preserving individual historic structures, but also to maintaining the overall integrity of historic townscapes and streetscapes.

Incentivizing Historic Preservation: economic growth facilitated by the heritage area will provide market-based incentives for local preservation projects, such as building rehabilitation, and government incentives for preservation might be created.

b. Conservation:

Conserving Cultural Heritage: saving and sharing the region's wealth of cultural heritage is a critical task, and helping area residents to value their own heritage is an absolutely vital part of this endeavor.

Protecting Natural Resources: developing both a robust regional environmental conservation framework and a strong conservation ethic among the public is essential to preserving the rural environment--a key aspect of authenticity and overall visitor experience.

c. Enhancement:

Improving the Region's "Heritage Tourism Infrastructure": providing the rationale / economic justification to create more and better museums and interpretive facilities; new scenic byways and heritage corridors; and a wider range of shopping, lodging, and dining options.

Enhancing Overall Regional Infrastructure: creating a powerful argument for improving communities in a number of respects: roads, sidewalks, schools, healthcare--to make communities more attractive to visitors, potential new residents, and more livable for current residents.

3. Marketing / Promotion and Economic Development
The Mississippi Hills Heritage Area can increase tourism and serve as the catalyst for broader economic development and community revitalization.

a. Marketing / Promotion:

Building a Strong Regional Identity / Branding: an important goal in and of itself, as well as essential to developing strong regional support for saving the region's stories, spaces, and places.

Increasing the Level of Visitation to the Region: marketing the region's stories and communities through a variety of innovative means--promotional campaigns, well-designed, user-friendly printed guidebooks, websites, etc.

b. Economic Development:

Facilitating Broader Economic Development Goals: using the heritage area to increase community capacity and improve quality of life, making area communities better places to live and do business.

Potential Thematic Tours; Existing Infrastructure; Potential Infrastructure Projects
While much of the region's rich and diverse cultural heritage is of national significance, no single aspect is inherently more deserving of attention than the others. Thus, the interpretive and promotional strategies for the heritage area will not utilize or feature one dominant theme, but rather will employ a series of primary and secondary themes, tours, and trails to facilitate a compelling exploration of the region's heritage and culture.

Please Note: See Heritage Resource Maps. This document includes information on: Thematic Tours, Existing Infrastructure, and Potential Infrastructure Projects.


What Are the Region's Greatest Strengths?
Although heritage areas facilitate a broad range of activities--from natural resource conservation to downtown revitalization--there is generally a "driving force". What will drive the creation of the Mississippi Hills Heritage Area? One way to determine this is to ask, How do the region's resources "stack up" against those elsewhere? After looking at the heritage resource maps, what are the region's greatest strengths? Weaknesses?

There are obvious interpretive themes of national relevance. Further, the region has an abundance of natural and recreational resources, and the rural character of the region is itself a key asset. But how do these two things relate to one another, and are they capable of driving the heritage-area-development process?

There is tremendous potential inherent in this powerful combination, in the region's diverse history and culture and its rural and scenic character. The region has many nationally-significant stories to tell, and the rural character of the communities and countryside in which they transpired is, to a significant degree, still intact.

You can still get a glimpse of the landscape and people that influenced Faulkner's writings. You can still see the small towns that Elvis Presley frequented in his youth--or travel the roads that Nathan Bedford Forrest's cavalry rode during the Civil War. The region has both incredible stories and a captivating, authentic "story-telling environment"--its small towns and rural countryside.

What can Northeast Mississippi offer that no other place in the country can? Elvis Presley's birthplace. The real Yoknapatawpha County, described in Faulkner's stories. The site of one of the Civil War's greatest tactical military victories, Brices Crossroads. The hometown of the Golden Age of Aviation's Premiere Barnstormer, Roscoe Turner, who was from Corinth.


Creating a Compelling Visitor Experience
The region must preserve, restore, and enhance the aesthetic integrity of its small towns and scenic landscape; equally important, it must endeavor to tell its stories in an authentic setting and in a compelling fashion. Quality must be valued above quantity: one good interpretive site is worth a dozen poor-quality sites.

The stories that the region's communities have to tell are second to none. Those who are involved with interpreting and sharing these stories must be committed to doing so in a manner befitting of the history itself--they must do the stories justice. And an important part of this endeavor is to preserve the authentic character of the settings.

The possibilities for guided tours, interpretive guidebooks, and living history programs are striking. One of the key areas of focus should be creating a compelling visitor experience--telling stories in a captivating fashion. If the region does preservation, conservation and interpretation correctly, it can develop a major heritage tourism enterprise. If it is successful in these core endeavors, everything else can follow, including numerous economic spinoff opportunities for local business people. But no amount of amenity-development will be able to successfully compensate if the region fails in its primary mission, which is to "save and share", to preserve and conserve, and to interpret and promote.