SAWMILL SQUARE MALL

910 Sawmill Road, Laurel, MS 39440 Back when I read Labelscar, the now-gone retail history blog and for a time one of my all-time favorite websites, one of the quirky, interesting small malls they covered was Sawmill Square Mall in Laurel, Mississippi. It was one of the few malls in the South covered (they mostly covered the smaller malls in the Northeast). I didn't expect to visit Sawmill Square Mall on my recent vacation but I did visit it anyway. It opened July 1, 1981 with JCPenney and McRae's. Both stuck around for years...JCPenney closed in 2020 when the company filed for bankruptcy, while McRae's was converted to Belk in 2006 after buying the stores from Saks Inc. in 2005.
I didn't see any mall directories inside but mall management was nice enough to make a mall directory on Facebook back in 2021 which I've attached below.

Surprisingly, there aren't too many changes since 2008 (relatively speaking). The outdated mall entrances were redone between 2016 and 2019 (see Google Street View). Gametraders is gone, but Claire's and Bath & Body Works hung out with their dated facades. Cowboy Maloney's Electric City is still there, but others were gone. A restaurant simply called "Tacos" was shuttered, and Chick-fil-A, despite blocking off part of the parking lot for pickup orders, has also left (I took a picture of that as well but decided not to show it off; you can see it in the Street View). I was just going to take a few pictures and shuffle out, but there it was...a Corn Dog 7! A real one! The one at my local Post Oak Mall closed years ago. It doesn't come in frozen like Sonic's stuff, it's fresh, the deep fryers are right there visible. I ate some pepperjack cheese on a stick. It was delicious. Pictures starting from JCPenney down to the Belk (Corn Dog 7).

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