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Fred Carl, Jr. Small Town Center Director shows multi-modal interpretive trail to Martin Luther King III

Mule Train 50th celebration_11Mule Train 50th celebration_1IMG_5931Mule Train 50th celebration_4IMG_5943IMG_5949Mule Train 50th celebration_15Mule Train 50th celebration_16Mule Train 50th celebration_18Mule Train 50th celebration_19Mule Train 50th celebration_23Mule Train 50th celebration_28Mule Train 50th celebration_29Mule Train 50th celebration_30Mule Train 50th celebration_31Mule Train 50th celebration_33Mule Train 50th celebration_38Mule Train 50th celebration_43Mule Train 50th celebration_47Mule Train 50th celebration_52Mule Train 50th celebration_65Contributed to by Sasha Steinberg | Mississippi State University

Martin Luther King III visited Marks in honor of the for a week of events from May 7-13.

Mississippi State University Carl Small Town Center (CSTC) Director Leah Kemp was invited to the celebration to tour King through the multi-modal interpretive trail designed by the research center. The trail highlights the Marks Mule Train Civil Rights campaign, a vision of his father in the 1960s.

The Carl Small Town Center recently received two statewide awards for its “Marking the Mule” project, which focused on advancing citizen engagement in the Marks community – a 2017 Public Outreach Award from the Mississippi Chapter of the American Planning Association and an AIA Design Award from the Mississippi Chapter of the American Institute of Architects.

In July 2015, the CSTC was awarded a $25,000 Our Town grant by the National Endowment for the Arts to work with the community to vision a way to commemorate the historic civil rights campaign.

The yearlong public outreach campaign project engaged local residents, historians, architects and planners. The CSTC developed interpretive pedestrian and vehicle trails along with corresponding signage highlighting Civil Rights-related sites in Marks. They also designed a master plan for the designated Trailhead Park and built a welcome sign showing interactive maps for new trails.

Fred E. Carl Jr., a major Mississippi State benefactor and the Carl Small Town Center’s namesake, is a Greenwood resident who founded and served as the first president and CEO of nationally recognized Viking Range Corp. A one-time architecture major at Ҵýapp, he endowed the university’s statewide community design outreach program in 2004.

The Carl Small Town Center, a community design center at Mississippi State University within the School of Architecture, was founded in 1979 to help address issues faced by Mississippi’s small towns.

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