Mississippi

Named for the great river

Mississippi takes its name from the river that forms its western border. The river’s name comes from the Anishinaabe, or Ojibwe, people of the upper Midwest and Canada, where the river begins. Their word, usually written Misi-ziibi, means “great river.” The name passed to the territory and then to the state along its banks.

The 20th state

The Mississippi Territory dates from 1798, with its first capital at Natchez. On March 1, 1817, Congress passed an enabling act opening the way to statehood, and a convention meeting at the town of Washington, near Natchez, adopted a state constitution on August 15. President James Monroe signed the resolution admitting Mississippi as the 20th state on December 10, 1817. The twenty white stars on today’s flag stand for that place in line.

Jackson, the planned capital

Natchez served as the first state capital, but settlement was shifting. The 1820 Treaty of Doak’s Stand opened a large area of Choctaw land in the middle of the state, and in 1821 the Legislature set up a commission to find a central site on a navigable river. It chose Le Fleur’s Bluff on the Pearl River, and the new town was named for Andrew Jackson. Lawmakers first met there on December 23, 1822. Jackson grew slowly, and several attempts to move the capital nearly succeeded before the 1832 constitutional convention settled the question. The story, and the 1903 Capitol paid for with back taxes from a railroad lawsuit, is on the capital page.

A new flag

For more than a century, Mississippi’s flag carried the Confederate battle flag in its corner. The Legislature adopted that design in 1894 with little public attention, and in a 2001 referendum more than 60 percent of voters chose to keep it, leaving Mississippi as the last state whose flag contained the Confederate emblem. In June 2020 the Legislature retired it and set up a commission to choose a new design, which could not include the battle emblem and had to include the words “In God We Trust.” The public sent in nearly 3,000 entries. In November 2020, 73 percent of voters approved the winner: a white magnolia blossom on blue, ringed by twenty stars, between red bars edged in gold. It became official on January 11, 2021. The flag page explains every part of it.

The Magnolia State

The magnolia is everywhere in Mississippi’s symbols. In 1900 schoolchildren voted it the state flower by a wide margin over the cotton blossom, although the Legislature waited until 1952 to make it official; it had already named the magnolia the state tree in 1938. The magnolia page covers both. The state bird is the northern mockingbird, chosen in 1944 and found in every part of the state. The motto on the state coat of arms is Virtute et Armis, “By valor and arms.”

A long list of symbols

Mississippi has 36 official state symbols. They include two state land mammals, the white-tailed deer and the red fox, and a state water mammal, the bottlenose dolphin. There are state museums for opera, automobiles and industrial heritage, a state soil called Natchez silt loam, a state toy and a state square dance. Some of the newest are the American Quarter Horse and the Kemp’s ridley sea turtle in 2024, the sweet potato in 2025 and an official Mississippi tartan in 2026. The state song since 2022 is Steve Azar’s “One Mississippi.” See every symbol on the Mississippi symbols page.

Land and people

Mississippi covers 48,432 square miles, 32nd among the states, including about 1,500 square miles of water. It had about 2.95 million residents in 2025, 35th in the country and slightly fewer than in 2020. The Mississippi River forms most of its western border with Arkansas and Louisiana; Tennessee lies to the north, Alabama to the east, and to the south the state faces the Gulf. Jackson, with about 141,000 people, is the largest city, followed by Gulfport, Southaven, Hattiesburg and Biloxi.