Buzzard Branch

Lamar County sits in the piney woods of south Mississippi, where the land rolls gently between stands of longleaf and loblolly pine and the air carries that particular resinous stillness you find throughout this corner of the Gulf South. Purvis is a small town just north of Hattiesburg, close enough to the regional golf scene there to draw serious players, but far enough removed to maintain its own unhurried character. Buzzard Branch takes its name — one of the more memorably unpretentious in American golf — from the kind of creek drainage that defines this terrain, where water winds through pine-forested lowlands and shapes the natural contours of the land.

Beyond its name and setting, detailed records of the course's design history and architecture aren't something I can speak to with confidence, so what's most honest is this: an 18-hole layout in this landscape will almost certainly put pine corridors, elevation changes carved from the rolling terrain, and water very much in play.

For golfers traveling through south Mississippi, Purvis offers a genuinely local alternative to the more developed Hattiesburg-area clubs — the kind of place where the game feels rooted in its surroundings rather than imposed on them.