HATTIESBURG, Miss.—Tatum Bass lay nauseated on the cheap living-room carpet of her Hattiesburg, Mississippi, apartment, her head pounding.
“Mom, I’m so sorry you’re sick,” she heard a small voice say as her 2-year-old daughter, Judy, carried a throw blanket over to her, unprompted, and covered her up.
That moment in February 2015 ushered in a transformation that Bass said amounted to a quantum change in her life.
“All these things happened in my brain at the same time. I was like, ‘No, I can’t do this anymore. She deserves a mom who is better than lying on the floor sick,’” she told the Mississippi Free Press as she walked along a shady section of the paved Longleaf Trace in Hattiesburg on June 25. “I was like, ‘I have to change our lives, and I’m the only one who can do it.’”
Bass quit drinking, left a marriage that she said wasn’t working, started running and began attending classes at the University of Southern Mississippi. One of the keys to her recovery, she said, was the Longleaf Trace, which serves bikers and pedestrians for 44 miles across Jefferson Davis, Lamar and Forrest counties.
“I would use the Trace as part of my commute to ride my bike to school. And then I would also, between a couple of my classes, come out and run,” she said. “I was going through a divorce at the same time that my mom was diagnosed with cancer. And so, from the time of her diagnosis, her death was about six months.”
The Longleaf Trace, Bass said, gave her time to clear her head, even as she faced monumental changes on the way to building a better life. It’s been an integral part of her life ever since; she’s grown as a runner, and now engages in “ultra running,” sometimes running 32 miles at a time with only one rest break. But she’s among hundreds of people who are worried that the entity that governs the Longleaf Trace is undermining its future.
In early June, Trace users began to notice something unexpected: The water fountains that bikers, runners and other users had long relied on to refuel and fill up their water bottles at stops along the trail were missing. Trace users had already noticed in recent months that bathrooms were frequently locked and inaccessible during the daytime, and with spring already having given way to smothering summer weather, the unexplained disappearance of the water fountains alarmed many.
Longleaf Trace users would soon learn that the board that oversees the Trace had removed the fountains, largely over concerns about how homeless people were using the trail’s facilities.
Homelessness at the Root of Decision
The Longleaf Trace began as a Rails-to-Trails project in the 1990s, after a committed group of locals converted an abandoned Mississippi Central Railroad line that once served the Pine Belt’s bustling timber industry into a pedestrian, equestrian and biking trail. Once completed in 2000, it ran from Prentiss to Hattiesburg, with stops in the towns of Bassfield and Sumrall.
People use the trail an estimated 250,000 times per year, with some people traveling from across the country to experience it. The Pearl & Leaf Rivers Rails to Trails Recreational District Board of Directors governs the trace, with one member from each of the three counties and each of the four municipalities it passes through.
On June 4, as temperatures were hovering near the 90s in Hattiesburg, the board quietly voted to remove the water fountains, with little public notice, prompted by their concerns over how homeless people were using the Trace. Only after confusion and outrage built on Facebook, spearheaded by groups like the Pine Belt Pacers, a local running club, did the board make a public statement.
“The Longleaf Trace Board of Directors has authorized the removal of all drinking fountains along the trail due to ongoing vandalism and unsanitary behavior,” a post from the official Longleaf Trace Facebook page read. “This decision has been made out of concern for the health and safety of all trail users. We encourage everyone using the trail to bring their own water. There are also select locations along the Trace that offer vending machines for beverage purchases.”
The board added that its focus was on making “decisions that prioritize the health, safety and well-being of our community.”
The post did little to quell the anger among Trace users, who pointed out the clear dangers of taking water away from runners, bikers and other trail users right as summer arrived.
“I don’t think that rises to the level of removing all of the water fountains, saying it’s a health hazard. Well, it’s a health hazard if somebody has a heatstroke out there as well,” Audrey Jackson, a trail user and the former president of the Pine Belt Pacers, told the Mississippi Free Press on June 25.
As the fury grew, the board’s president, Lamar County Supervisor Dale Lucas, traveled to Jed’s Perfect Endurance Bikes, a bike shop next to Jackson Station, one of the Trace’s most popular whistle stops in Lamar County. Deborah Darby, who co-owns the shop with her husband Jed Darby, recounted the visit in an interview with the Mississippi Free Press.
“(Jed) said they showed somebody washing their underwear in a fountain. But that is not going to transfer disease to anybody because they’re not licking the stainless steel fountains. If they would do cleaning every now and then of those fountains, that’d null and void it,” she said on June 30.
She said the board president “wanted us to subdue everybody and get everybody to calm down about it.” But she said that neither she nor her husband were convinced by the content of the videos. As the bathrooms have become less reliable, and particularly since the removal of the water fountains, she said they’ve seen an influx of Trace users coming to their business to use the bathroom and to get water.
“There’s a lot of customers coming in who are furious and who were unprepared. There was no notification of them removing the water fountains. So with the bathrooms being locked a lot of the time, there’s no way for them to get water,” she told the Mississippi Free Press on June 30.
The Mississippi Free Press was able to confirm the existence of some of those security camera images, including some that appeared to show a person pouring cement into one of the water fountains’ water coolers. Other images showed a cardboard mat that the source said a homeless person had used to sleep in one of the Trace’s bathrooms and a crack pipe in a sink.
Several Trace users the Mississippi Free Press spoke with had also heard about videos like the one of the woman washing her undergarments, but none was persuaded that those incidents represented a public-health threat sufficient to justify removing water fountains.
Lucas declined a request to grant an on-the-record interview for this story on June 23, pointing instead to the statement that Trace had posted on its official Facebook page earlier that day. On July 1, shortly before publication, the Mississippi Free Press reached out to him again.
The board president warned that the story is “probably going to cost us funding next year.”
“Because they just won’t let the Facebook stuff go. We’re going to have a meeting tomorrow, and they’re not going to let this go, and they don’t care,” Lucas said. “The sad fact is, the one’s that’s pushing this, they do not care. We can just go pour Purex in it every morning. We have over 41 miles to keep up, and to get what they want, they don’t care. How many people are going to complain when they go up there to get a drink of water, and it smells like Purex bleach? Everybody’s going to be mad. And it’s sad.”
He said he planned to show a slideshow of images to attendees at the board meeting on Thursday, July 2, to demonstrate why the fountains had to be removed. He said he will not change his mind despite public pressure to restore the water fountains.
“I’m not voting to reverse this. There’s too many innocent people out there that don’t know what’s going on,” he said, adding that he “wouldn’t vote to reverse this for a million dollars.”
He did not agree to share anything further on the record.
‘You Could Die From That’
Gage Bezoski, a 15-year-old runner for the Sumrall High School Bobcats Track and Field Team who trains on the Trace for hours at a time, was on a long run on June 14 when he stopped to get some water. That’s when he discovered that the water fountain he had relied on during past runs to refill was gone.
“I ran out of water with a few miles to go, and I was just waiting for it to be over so that I could get to the drinking fountain when I finished, and it wasn’t there,” he told the Mississippi Free Press on June 25.
His mother, Chris Bezoski, said the sudden removal of the water fountains has made her reconsider letting her son run on the Trace.
“I don’t know if I’m going to let him go out there in the heat and run those distances. … I mean, he’s running 70-plus miles per week,” she said. “And we’re in the height of summer. It’s very frustrating and scary.”
Jane Kersh, an ophthalmologist in Hattiesburg who runs marathons and is currently using the Trace to train for the TCS Sydney Marathon in Australia, told the Mississippi Free Press that it’s impractical to expect people who run or bike long distances to carry enough water without needing to refill.
“If you’re hiking, you can carry a Camelbak,” she said, referring to a backpack-like hydration tool for carrying water. “But when you’re running, you can’t have three liters of water on your back with a plastic bag,” she said.
As a doctor, Kersh said she’s highly concerned about the risks of Trace users not having enough water in the heat. “You could die from that. It’s a serious thing. And we don’t want to stop running,” she said.
Jeff Goodell, the author of “The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet,” emphasized the importance of water “in a world that’s getting hotter.”
“People die all the time as a result of not having access to shade and water. And I just think that, especially for public infrastructure, it’s really basic and fundamental,” he told the Mississippi Free Press in an interview on June 26.
Climate change is a reality, he said, pointing to the ongoing historic heat wave in Europe that has killed more than 1,300 people so far this summer.
“I live in Texas. You live in Mississippi. We all feel it. It’s not a rumor or some kind of ‘woke’ fantasy. It is measurable. It is true. It is happening. And we need to prepare for it,” he said, emphasizing “the fundamental importance of water.”
“Our bodies have one way of dealing with heat, and that is sweat, right?” he continued. “That’s the only cooling mechanism humans have to deal with heat. And access to water is crucial because if you don’t have enough water, if you don’t have something to drink, you can stop sweating if you become dehydrated. And once that happens, your cooling mechanism shuts off and the risk gets much, much higher. (Removing the water fountains) seems like an invitation to all kinds of suffering and disasters that nobody wants to see on a trail like this.”
Susan Dobson, a trail user and public-health instructor at the University of Southern Mississippi, assembled an evidence-based fact sheet for advocates to use in an effort to convince Trace leadership to reinstall the water fountains.
“The question before community leaders is not whether drinking fountains can or have been misused. The real question is whether removing access to water poses a greater public health risk than keeping fountains available,” the document begins. “The evidence suggests it does.”
The sheet emphasizes the well-known public-health concerns around dehydration, heat exhaustion and heat stroke. Dobson’s document notes that “serious illness from drinking fountains is extremely rare,” that “most contamination involves surfaces rather than the drinking water itself” and that “public health agencies do not routinely identify drinking fountains as a significant source of community illness.”
Dobson pointed to a 2017 Pacific Institute report.
“Concerns over drinking water quality and possible disease transmission, as well as widely publicized water contamination incidents, have contributed to a decline in the number of publicly available water fountains,” the 2017 report said. “Yet many people rely on drinking fountains for cheap, accessible, and safe municipal water. This report finds limited causal evidence linking illness and the use of drinking fountains.”
The handout argues that “public policy should aim to reduce the greater risk.”
“Public health is about managing risk—not eliminating one unlikely risk by increasing a much larger one,” it argues.
Longleaf Piney Resort, which offers rental cabins just off the side of the Trace not far from Clyde Depot, responded to the removal of the water fountains by providing a cooler filled with bottled water on the side of the trail for users to rehydrate for free.
‘You Don’t Give Victory to Vandals’
James Moore, the owner of Moore’s Bike Shop in Hattiesburg, said he’s been noticing growing problems at the Trace for months. Twice a week for the past seven years, he has taken groups of people recovering from addiction out on bike rides along the Trace, starting at the gateway near the University of Southern Mississippi.
During one morning ride this past winter, Moore brought the group to a bathroom along the Trace—only to find that it was locked. During the winter, the board also placed black garbage bags over the water fountains in an effort to prevent them from freezing during cold nights.
“They were trying to mitigate damage by just turning the water off to the outside facilities completely. That means you can’t use the restroom,” he told the Mississippi Free Press on June 25. “So I offered a solution.”
Moore told Trace officials that he would use his own money and skills to build insulated plywood boxes that would keep the water coolers from freezing and allow the bathrooms to remain available. The board did not accept his offer, he said.
“I was told at one point that, ‘Well, we discovered that we saw someone on the camera one night urinating in one of the water fountains, so you don’t want to drink out of that water fountain anyway,’” Moore recalled. Still, he said, “You don’t penalize every user on the trail because of one or two miscreants” and “you don’t give victory to the vandals under any circumstances.”
With the problems users experience with bathroom access and the lack of water fountains only growing worse in the spring and summer, the bicycle-shop owner has only grown less patient with the explanations. “In the daytime, the restrooms need to be open,” he said.
The story about a woman washing her underwear beneath a water fountain also had not persuaded him to change his mind. “She’s a homeless person. She’s trying to survive,” Moore said.
Addiction is personal to him; in 2015, he lost his 24-year-old son, Jeffrey, to a drug overdose.
“People in addiction are people, too,” Moore said. “And these people who are recovering are in programs that are participating in these rides that are rebuilding their lives. They need to be able to drink water, and they need to be able to go in and use a restroom anytime during daylight.”
He added that he understands it’s frustrating for Trace leaders to have to deal with the misbehavior of a few, “but you don’t punish the other 100,000 a year that come out to use that facility, and you sure don’t punish the families that drove two or 300 miles to have that one experience on this trail that was rated so highly in a magazine they read about.”
‘I’m Going to Go Over to Louisiana’
Indeed, when this reporter visited Clyde Depot, a station between Hattiesburg and Sumrall on June 26, one man from Tennessee who had driven from his home in Tennessee to ride the Trace expressed confusion over the lack of water fountains.
Chris Weir, a cyclist from Houston, Mississippi, was riding the Tanglefoot Trail—a 43-mile Rails-to-Trails project that stretches across Chickasaw, Pontotoc and Union counties—on June 25 when he spoke to the Mississippi Free Press. He also likes to visit the Trace, but the decision to remove the water fountains, he said, would deter future visitors.
“It doesn’t seem like it’d be very friendly. I mean, if it was me, I wouldn’t come back,” he said. “You know, that’d be the first and last time if it was the first time I’d been there.”
Lisa Lynn Wilson, who lives in Mobile, Alabama, said her family started making the drive to visit the Trace in the 2010s. They also visited Hattiesburg regularly when their daughter was a student at USM. She and her husband still come fairly often to run, but she worries that the current issues could have a negative economic impact on the city.
“We’d go to her apartment and (after riding the Trace) we’d spend the afternoon with her, and we’d be spending our money taking her to lunch and going to get coffee,” she said. “It’d be a shame for Hattiesburg to miss out on opportunities like people like me who are coming in and spending their money.”
Meg Martens Henderson and her husband are both cyclists who have long ridden on the Trace. When they lived in Starkville, Mississippi, they would drive hours just to ride on it. They now live in Ocean Springs on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, but Henderson said that she won’t be returning anytime soon with the water fountains gone.
“The next time I want to ride a Rail-to-Trail, I’m going to go over to Louisiana and ride the Tammany Trace because they have open restrooms and water fountains over there, and I hate to say that because Hattiesburg is a little bit closer,” she told the Mississippi Free Press on June 29.
Nicole Shiver, a member of the Pinebelt Pacers who lives in nearby Purvis, not far from the trail, says the decision will also reduce her time on the Trace. Having inconsistent access to restrooms has already put strain on her relationship with the trail because “it’s just unpredictable whether you can stop on a run or not,” she said.
“When you run for multiple hours on end, it’s just not feasible to carry that much water with you,” she said. “I suppose you could bring water in your vehicle, do a few miles and keep circling back, but the point and the whole reason I go out on the trail is to run a straight shot out and back.”
“If I’m going to have to loop anyway,” she added, “I’ll run at the campground here in Purvis, at Little Black Creek. I might as well do that three-or four-mile loop instead of driving all the way out to Hattiesburg to use the Trace.”
Advocates Strategize Ahead of Board Meeting
Trail user Cheyenne Dixon organized the newly re-formed Friends of the Trace advocacy group. Around a dozen members who met at Mercury Pizza in Hattiesburg to strategize on how to approach the board at its next meeting on Thursday, July 2.
They’re hoping not only to make the board aware of the community’s concerns over the water fountains, but to “open the door for long-term, meaningful collaboration” between the board and trail users, she told the Mississippi Free Press on July 1.
Last week, Jordan Talbot launched a Change.org petition, urging the board to restore the water fountains. As of July 1, more than 900 people have signed it.
Talbot is a cyclist from New York, but moved with her husband to Mississippi in July 2025 after he was stationed at Camp Shelby. She was upset at first about having to move to Mississippi, but she soon discovered the Longleaf Trace—and that made it a lot more palatable.
“One of the things I found right off the bat was the Trace, and I said, OK, there’s a safe place to ride my bike and run. I’ll figure it out from there,” she told the Mississippi Free Press on June 29.
Leslie McCain Farmer, who served as president of the original Friends of the Trace in the late 2000s, is among the advocates planning to attend the meeting and make the case for restoring the water fountains and ensuring daytime access to bathrooms. The Trace, which she uses regularly, runs by her home, but she said she worries that not all of the board members use the Trace and understand the necessity of water fountains.
“I think this was a drastic decision on their part,” she told the Mississippi Free Press on June 23. “And they really didn’t think it through, because when I rode 40 miles with my husband—and granted, we only do 20 now—we filled up our water bottles twice.”
Farmer said it’s important for the trail to offer essentials like water, with bathrooms that are open from sunrise to sunset, not only for health reasons but also for economic ones. In the span of one day, she said, she met people who had traveled from Texas, Alabama and Florida to ride the Longleaf Trace. Losing water fountains and bathroom access could deter visitors, she said, along with the tourism dollars they bring into towns and counties along the Trace.
But she said it’s also about ensuring the Trace is there for everyone.
“I saw a woman out there pushing her mother in a wheelchair. I don’t know how far they went. … Her mom was just smiling and she was having the best time,” Farmer said.
The Trace users whom the Mississippi Free Press spoke to for this story made multiple suggestions for solving the problems with the bathrooms and addressing concerns about vandalism and misuse of water fountains. The board could install water spigots along with restoring the water fountains, several suggested. Others suggested replacing the water fountains with bottle-refilling. Others said the board ought to consider placing automatic door locks on the bathrooms that lock at sunset and open at sunrise.
Susan Dobson’s fact sheet also included the following suggestions:
- Establish Protocols: Set routine cleaning and maintenance protocols.
- Prompt Repairs: Repair vandalism promptly.
- Targeted Control: Temporarily close individual fountains if documented contamination occurs.
- Modernize: Install bottle-filling stations where feasible.
- Education: Encourage responsible use through signage and education.
More than a dozen Trace users told the Mississippi Free Press that they plan to attend the board meeting on Thursday, July 2, at 10 a.m. at the Longleaf Trace Gateway at 2895 West 4th Street in Hattiesburg near USM.
‘It’s Public Funds’
South Mississippi Trails Alliance President Zack McRaney’s organization tends mountain bike trails and other recreational trails located just off the Longleaf Trace located just off the Longleaf Trace. He said he’s concerned that unreliable bathroom access on the Trace could result in the land he tends becoming “a proverbial dumping ground for waste.” He also noted that the bathrooms and water fountains are not privately funded.
“It’s public funds. So, you know, they’re not wasting private money; they’re wasting taxpayer money,” he told the Mississippi Free Press on June 29.
Each of the three counties and the four municipalities that the Trace runs through helps fund the trail through property taxes. The Trace also gets funding from the state and from federal grants. Private donors can also contribute.
Becky Ryder, the founder of the Pine Belt Pacers, said her group has donated between $20,000 and $30,000 to the Trace since the running club’s inception.
“Unless they reverse course, that’s over,” she told the Mississippi Free Press.
Chad Edmonson, Hattiesburg’s member on the board and the only one who voted against removing the water fountains, did not agree to an interview for this story, saying he could not speak on behalf of the board.
“The Longleaf Trace is one of our area’s greatest treasures, and I think the strong response around this particular issue demonstrates how many people love it,” he wrote on June 30.
‘Nobody Wants Their Safe Place to Be a Bathroom’
Tatum Bass pushed her 3-year-old son Bill in a stroller along the Longleaf Trace while his big brother, 5-year-old Bert, searched for native pawpaw plants on the side of the trail on June 26. The trio stopped on a bridge that crosses over Highway 49, where they all looked down and pumped the air as 18-wheelers passed below, eliciting honks in return.
“Making the big trucks honk,” she said, is one of their favorite activities.
As she recalled the moment when her daughter (now a teen) put a blanket over her as she lay on the floor suffering from a hangover, Bass compared the change it caused in her to the one Ebenezer Scrooge experienced when he was visited by four ghosts.
“I had been looking for love. And she loved me, and I didn’t even have to do anything,” Bass said. “I didn’t understand that someone could just love me for no reason. And then she did. Out loud, and she cared for me when I really didn’t care for myself.”
The mom of three from Petal, Mississippi, is among those who were not persuaded that a homeless woman washing her clothes under a water fountain justified removing them.
“Nobody wants their safe place to be a bathroom,” she said.
“But they need it,” Bert interjected as he rode his bike slightly ahead down the Trace while his mother pushed Bill.
“Nobody wants that,” she continued. “Nobody wants to be washing their underwear in a water fountain. They’re just real people out here surviving.”
Shortly after the Mississippi Free Press interviewed James Moore, he called to offer some additional thoughts. He was thinking about a municipal training he attended during his time serving as an alderman in the City of Petal from 2005 to 2009.
At one of those trainings, he met Joseph Riley, who at the time was the mayor of Charleston, South Carolina. The mayor told Moore and the other trainees about a waterfront project he’d helped oversee at an abandoned property. Riley had insisted that any development on the waterfront be open to the people of Charleston and offer mixed-income housing. A developer agreed to build three-story-tall condominiums for mixed-income families, complete with a pedestrian path for the public.
“After it was open, the mayor was doing his Saturday morning job, and he’s running down this jogging path along the bay, and he looks up and he sees this third-floor condominium. The door opens up, and this guy with a white robe walks out on his veranda with china and a cup of espresso, the Wall Street Journal tucked under his arm, and he sits down in his furniture looking out over the bay,” Moore said. “And at the same time, the mayor was running by a homeless guy, sitting on a park bench, with a convenient Styrofoam cup of coffee and a Charleston Daily News, looking out over the bay. (The mayor) said at that one moment in time, both of these gentlemen had that shared experience because (the) government did something.”
The Moore’s Bicycle Shop owner said he shares that story with the groups of people in recovery who ride out on the Trace with him.
“We’ll stop, and I’ll say, ‘You’ve already seen a few paths that go off this trail. These paths lead to places where people put their heads down at night,’” Moore said. “‘But for the time that they come up that trail and they’re on this trail walking into town or walking to the gateway or the convenience store, during that moment of time, they blend in with the rest of us and they have a little bit of normalcy in their life, just like the rest of us.’”
“You know,” he added, “Thank God they have a place like the Longleaf Trace where they can be one of us for one small part of their day.”
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