Ridgeland, Mississippi

Ridgeland sits directly north of Jackson along the Natchez Trace Parkway corridor, a planned suburb that incorporated in nineteen seventy-two and grew rapidly through the following decades as Jackson's professional class sought housing outside the city during and after the upheavals of desegregation. The town's name refers to the gentle ridge of higher ground that runs through this part of central Mississippi, separating the Pearl River drainage to the east from the smaller Bogue Chitto Creek watersheds. Ridgeland today has a population of around twenty-four thousand and is one of the wealthier municipalities in Mississippi, with a commercial strip along Highway Fifty-One and access to the Barnett Reservoir, a large artificial lake completed in nineteen sixty-three that provides water supply and recreation for the Jackson metro area. The Natchez Trace Parkway, a National Park Service road following an ancient Native American and colonial-era trail, passes through the western edge of town.