PACCAR is building a second factory next door to its current facility. Gov. Tate Reeves, who attends ground-breaking ceremonies with the same enthusiasm as a fat man at an all-you-can-eat buffet, joined a gathering of about 100 to celebrate the beginning of work on the 50,000 square-foot facility that will rebuild diesel engines. With the addition, PACCAR will have a piece of both the new and used diesel engine market. It’s a roughly $200 million investment and will create 100 new jobs.

At the risk of redundancy, let me just say Wow!

If you’ve spent much time driving the highways.

In what is loosely described as the Lowndes County Industrial Park, 20 companies representing $10 billion in capital investments while creating 10,000 new jobs in the past two decades. First Steel Dynamics and now PACCAR have built facilities to produce new products. Really, it’s like adding two more major companies to the lineup.

Unless you were around the area 20 years ago, you probably can’t fully appreciate the enormity – and improbability – of it all.

I started my newspaper career as a sports writer in 1982. I covered high school and college sports, which meant driving all over the state. In some places, past highway signs for communities that no longer exist – Egypt, Electric Mills, Cotton Gin Port.

But the ghost towns of Mississippi weren’t the saddest sights along the highway. That distinction belonged to places that had big signs identifying the area as the town or county “Industrial Park.” The sign was the only thing on the site that was built by human hands. The sites never lived up to their billing. Odds are, they never will. They are a cruel joke.

That’s what the stretch of land along Highway 82 between Highway 45 South and Highway 45 Alternate, looked like until the early mid-2000s.

About the only things between Mayhew and the Tombigbee were the Golden Triangle Regional Airport, which opened 1971, and the Weyerhaeuser plant (now International Paper), which opened in 1982. Neither turned out to be a manufacturing magnet, at least not for many, many years.

Then came Severstal (Now Steel Dynamics) in 2005 followed by PACCAR in 2010. In quick succession came Airbus Helicopters (originally American Eurocopter), Stark Aerospace, Aurora Flight Sciences and Quality Beverages, which opened its new $10 million, 50,000 square-foot facility in 2023.

How the heck did that happen? Hint: It ain’t Tate Reeves.

What happened is that local governments put up some serious bucks to build infrastructure and recruit these manufacturers through a capable and assertive economic development apparatus known as the Golden Triangle Development LINK.

Golden Triangle grew into the best regional airport in the state and became a key recruiting tool, allowing business executives from headquarters easy access to the facilities they would build here. Access to air, rail, water and highway made the area appealing. But without the cooperation and participation of the local Golden Triangle governments and a well-funded, well-staffed recruiting engine, Highway 82 in west Lowndes County would be like so many other industrial development sites, which only produce weeds.

At other industrial parks scattered throughout the state, it’s a surprise when a new company moves in.

In Lowndes County, it’s a surprise when it doesn’t.

Twenty years later, it remains Wow-worthy.

Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].

Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].