The Longleaf Trace Fountain Fight Reveals Who Really Runs This Trail

For about ten weeks this summer, the Longleaf Trace had no water.

On June 4, the Longleaf Trace Board of Directors voted to remove every drinking fountain along the 44-mile trail. The vote happened quietly, with little public notice, as temperatures in Hattiesburg pushed toward 90 degrees. The board's stated reason, posted later to the trail's Facebook page after confusion built, cited vandalism and unsanitary behavior tied to how homeless individuals were using the fountains. By August 20, the fountains were back, rebuilt with design changes meant to resist the same problems. Ten weeks is a short window for a public body to reverse itself. What happened in between says more about how this trail actually functions than any brochure copy about pine forests and beaver ponds ever could.

A Decision Made Without the People Who Use It Daily

The board's June 4 vote wasn't debated at a public meeting most residents attended. It surfaced almost by accident, through a Facebook post that read simply that the fountains were being removed "due to ongoing vandalism and unsanitary behavior." No timeline, no alternative plan for hydration, no acknowledgment yet of who would be affected.

The people affected organized fast. Pine Belt Pacers, the local running club that hosts weekly group runs on the Trace, helped drive the pushback once word spread. Jane Kersh, a Hattiesburg ophthalmologist who was training on the Trace for the TCS Sydney Marathon, put the practical problem plainly: distance runners can't carry enough water to make up for a missing fountain in July heat. Hikers can strap on a hydration pack. Someone running six or eight miles in Mississippi summer humidity cannot, without real risk.

That is the detail that matters here. This wasn't a debate about aesthetics or budget line items. It was a debate about whether people would have access to water on a public trail during the hottest months of the year, decided first without much input from the people who'd actually be out there sweating.

Why 300,000 Annual Uses Changes the Math

The Longleaf Trace is not a quiet nature path that a handful of hobbyists visit on weekends. Longleaf Trace Executive Director Mary Scruggs has estimated the trail sees at least 300,000 uses a year, a figure that includes the medical staff and university students who use it to commute, since Hattiesburg functions as a regional medical hub anchored by two universities. That volume is why the fountain decision couldn't stay a quiet administrative matter. A trail with that much daily foot and bike traffic has, in effect, thousands of daily auditors. Something as basic as a missing water source gets noticed within days, not months.

Here's roughly how the summer played out:

Ten weeks from removal to replacement is fast for any public infrastructure decision, faster still for one governed by a volunteer board rather than an elected city council facing reelection pressure. The accountability here didn't come from a ballot box. It came from a running club, a handful of vocal daily users, and a trail popular enough that its absence of water became a story within days.

The Businesses That Grew Up Around a Rail Line

None of this urgency exists in a vacuum. The Trace has spent three decades becoming genuine economic infrastructure, not just a recreational amenity, and the businesses clustered near its trailheads prove it.

James Moore has owned and operated his bicycle shop in Hattiesburg for 40 years, long enough to remember downtown Hattiesburg as what he's described as a ghost town in the 1970s, after a new mall pulled Sears, JCPenney, and other anchor stores away from Main Street. He watched a grassroots effort in the 1990s turn an old rail corridor, laid in 1897 and abandoned by 1993, into the paved trail that exists today. That history isn't ancient. It's the reason downtown Hattiesburg has a pulse again.

In 2025, Jed Darby moved his business, Jed's Perfect Endurance Bikes, to a new location closer to the trail after running it for ten years elsewhere. The new space added a coffee bar, bike rentals, and showers. February, historically the shop's slowest month, turned into a record sales month instead. Darby also hosts group rides on the Trace, drawing crowds as large as 60 riders at a time, something he's done for 11 years running.

That's not a coincidence of good timing. It's what happens when a business plants itself directly on a corridor that 300,000 people a year actually use.

The Art You Pass Without Slowing Down

Ride the Trace through the 4th Street tunnel near N 38th Avenue and you'll pass a 200-foot mural called "Together as One," painted by Miami muralist Ivan Roque as one stop on the HBURG Public Art Trail, a growing collection of large-scale murals that has quietly turned stretches of the Trace into something closer to an open-air gallery than a simple bike path.

None of that art exists because a committee decided the trail needed decoration. It exists because a corridor with that much daily traffic became worth investing in, the same underlying logic that explains why a bike shop relocated and why a fountain removal became a local controversy within a week.

Where the Trail Feeds Back Into Downtown

The Trace connects directly into Downtown Hattiesburg, and the city's monthly First Saturday events lean on that connection on purpose. Downtown Hattiesburg's own guidance for the day suggests hopping on a bike to take in more of the district, since the Trace links straight to downtown's Art Trail and Freedom Summer Trail routes.

On a First Saturday, that means someone can ride in off the Trace and land in the middle of a street market run by The Lucky Rabbit, grab a pour at Southern Prohibition Brewing, or settle in at The Porter Public House, all within the same walkable blocks the trail feeds into. The Trace isn't separate from downtown life here. It's one of the main ways people arrive at it.

"The downtown area of Hattiesburg back in the '70s became a ghost town like many downtowns did," Moore has said, describing the years before the rail line found new life as a trail.

That line is worth sitting with. A disused railroad corridor didn't just become a place to exercise. It became the thing that pulled a downtown back from the version of itself Moore remembers from four decades ago.

What the Fountain Fight Actually Tells You

Strip away the specifics and the pattern is simple. A public trail with 300,000 annual uses, run by a small board rather than an elected body, tried to make a quiet administrative call about a piece of basic infrastructure. Within roughly ten weeks, that call was reversed, not through a formal appeals process but through the sheer volume and organization of people who rely on the trail daily.

If you already run, ride, or walk the Trace, that's not abstract news. It's a reminder that the small decisions affecting the trail, water fountains, bench placement, mural commissions, tend to move fast in either direction once enough regular users notice and speak up. Keep an eye on the Trace's own updates each summer, since that's historically when usage peaks and small infrastructure problems surface first.

Hattiesburg's identity runs through this corridor more than most residents probably stop to consider on a Tuesday morning jog. A rail line that timber companies abandoned in 1993 is now the reason a bike shop owner moved locations, the reason a mural exists under a city tunnel, and the reason a fountain removal became a story people organized around within days. That's not a trail that happens to run through town. It's closer to the spine the town organizes itself around.

If you're weighing a move to a neighborhood built around infrastructure like this, or you already live here and want a read on how a specific pocket of Hattiesburg connects to daily life on the Trace, AM EQUITY REALTY knows these streets well enough to talk it through properly. Book a consultation whenever you're ready.