The Ulysses S. Grant Presidential Library sits inside Mississippi State's Mitchell Memorial Library and is the strongest cultural reason to stop in Starkville. The museum presents Grant as cadet, general, president, and elder statesman, with interactive displays and material from a large research collection of correspondence, photographs, artifacts, and published works.
It is especially good if you are interested in the Civil War, Reconstruction, or the strange geography of American memory. Grant spent little time in Mississippi as president, but his papers landed here, and the result gives Starkville an unexpectedly weighty historical stop.