Kentwood, Louisiana

Kentwood, Louisiana sits a few miles south of the Mississippi state line in Tangipahoa Parish. The town was named Kentwood in eighteen eighty-eight for Amos Kent, who helped lay out the settlement. It stayed a small farming community through most of the twentieth century, population hovering around two thousand.

Then in nineteen ninety-nine, a teenager from right here on Highway Fifty-One released her first album and sold thirty million copies worldwide. Britney Spears was born in nearby McComb but grew up entirely in Kentwood, and the town has embraced that connection ever since.