Its motto: By Valor and Arms,

Its nicknames: Bayou State, Border-Eagle State, Eagle State, Magnolia State, Mudcat State.

Magnolias and Mockingbirds in a Land Nobody Wants to Leave

Lovely and languorous, Mississippi is the most traditionally southern of all the Deep South states. Here the legendary cotton fields sprawl in the sun beside sloping green levees. Here stand cool white-columned mansions shaded by magnolias that bear huge creamy blossoms. Mockingbirds sing deliriously from the treetops. Confederate cemetries are still decorated with fresh flowers, and longleaf pine forests sweep grandly south to the splendid Gulf Coast beaches.

Perhaps the most distinctive region of the state is the Delta, an elliptical floodplain lying between the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers. This is a cotton country — flat, nearly treeless, home of the very rich and the very poor. It was this fertile land that made possible the leisurely and luxurious plantation lifestyle for which Mississippi has been both envied and censured. The Mississippi Delta area is known not only for cotton but for its music, in particular the blues. This uniquely American musical form evolved from the work songs of the Delta slaves.

East of the Mississippi floodplain, much of the state is a mix of undulating hills and prairies, forests, and farmland. The highest elevations are the southernmost ridges of the Appalachian Mountains. The best known of the prairie regions, just west of these hills, is the long, narrow Black Belt, so named for its dark and fertile soil.

Most of the lower third of the state is known as the Pine Hills, or the Piney Woods. Driving through these silvery-green pine woods, one comes at last to the coastal lowlands, where U.S. Highway 90 runs for 26 miles along the wide sandy man-made beaches of the Gulf of Mexico,

Such natural beauty, impressive all through the state, strengthens the love of land that makes Mississippi natives reluctant to leave. Nearly 90 percent of the people living in Mississippi were born there, and many are eager to write about it, sing about it, or capture it on canvas. William Faulkner, one of America's great writers, modeled his mythical Yoknapatawpha County on his home county where he spent most of his life. The Piney Woods nurtured opera star Leontyne Price, and the Black Belt produced Elvis Presley. Countless other musicians, poets, dancers, and painters have drawn inspiration from this land.

In 1817 Mississippi became the 20th state.

(”The USA Diversity of 50 States”)