The Cotton District is a community located in Starkville, Mississippi and was the first new urbanism development in the world. It was founded by Dan Camp, who is the developer, owner and property manager of much of the area.
The Cotton District has elements of Greek Revival mixed with Classical or Victorian. Many of these ideas came from Camp’s own travels to Europe and even parts of the United States, like Charleston and New Orleans. The Cotton District is a walkable neighborhood that contains many restaurants and bars in addition to thousands of unique residential units, many which are filled by college students and young professionals.
New Urbanist architect and co-founder of the Congress for the New Urbanism Andres Duany has visited Starkville on multiple occasions to observe Camp and get ideas from his innovative development. "He's the most interesting story in the U.S.," Duany was quoted as saying in a 1994 issue of Builder magazine, the magazine of the National Association of Home Builders.
The area is home to the annual Cotton District Arts Festival which now boasts as many as 20,000 attendants each year. It also hosts the annual Bulldog Bash, which draws over 30,000 people for the festival's free concerts and has featured artists such as Third Eye Blind, Gavin Degraw, Sister Hazel, Howie Day, Will Hoge and Edwin McCain among others.
Starkville is adjacent to the campus of Mississippi State University and is also a registered retirement community.
Famous quotes containing the words cotton and/or district:
“The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn’t need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder—in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.”
—Maya Angelou (b. 1928)
“Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)