Center was a Choctaw Indian settlement before the first Europeans entered south Mississippi. It was bounded by Catahoula Creek on the east and Playground Branch on the west and was in the geographical center of Hancock County (before the creation of Pearl River County). Its original name was a Choctaw term meaning “center” or “coming together” or “where everybody meets up.”
Early Europeans discovered the settlement because so many of the original Indian roads converged here, and they, too, decided to build homes here as well. At one time Center has a post office, courthouse, jail, hotel, barroom, small stores, and fifty to one hundred wigwams. Apparently relations between the white settlers and the Indians were quite good. Thigpen relates that in 1940 he saw the remnants of “an old dungeon, or jail, and clay deposits for chimneys, evidence of the village there.”