If the schedule holds, the green columns rising between the GM&O Depot and Hal & Mal's on East Pearl Street are expected to finish construction this month as the downtown front door of the Museum Trail. The Capitol Green Connector extends the downtown end of a path that opened in 2021, about 2.5 miles by Visit Jackson's count, from the Two Mississippi Museums to LeFleur's Bluff. Planners describe a full network of about six miles from Jackson State University through downtown and Belhaven to the museums on Lakeland Drive. Separate from that, a bridge over Lakeland Drive has begun construction, and a leg along Eastover Drive to Ridgewood Road was contracted in 2021.

Start with what exists. The Museum Trail opened Jan. 13, 2021, at a cost of about $1.6 million, with a $1.1 million federal grant and a privately raised match. The paved path begins at Mississippi and Jefferson streets behind the Two Mississippi Museums and the Mississippi Farmers Market, runs north along the old Gulf, Mobile and Ohio rail bed that forms the eastern edge of Belhaven and Belhaven Heights, crosses Interstate 55, and ends at Museum Drive by the Mississippi Children's Museum. It was Jackson's first rail-trail. Neel-Schaffer designed it and Hemphill Construction built it. The Jackson Heart Foundation and the Greater Belhaven Neighborhood Foundation drove the project, and the city's parks department maintains it. A connector past the city's waterworks was added in 2023.

The downtown piece has slipped once already. In October 2025, WLBT reported the Capitol Green Connector was expected to open in spring or summer 2026. By Aug. 19 of this year, the station reported construction was expected to wrap up in October. The connector ties together the Old Capitol District, the Depot, Hal & Mal's, Martin's, the Two Mississippi Museums, the Mississippi Museum of Art, the Old Capitol Museum, and the planetarium. The next phase is supposed to continue west through the arts district and across the railroad tracks that separate Jackson State from downtown. Travis Crabtree of TREE Urban Design told WLBT that more than 30 groups are involved. WLBT reported the rest of the six-mile network could take up to three more years.

The western expansion has planning money but no construction money the Wire could find. In 2023, a $588,000 Reconnecting Communities and Neighborhoods planning grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation was awarded for the 2.5-mile extension through downtown and West Jackson to Jackson State. Planning grants generally fund design work rather than construction. The Wire found no construction funding on the record for the stretch west of the Depot.

Mayor John Horhn has been explicit about why the city is in. 'It's not just about creating a bike trail or a walking trail, it's about business,' he told WLBT. The goal, he said, is to 'spread economic development along the trail.' Jane Alexander of the Community Foundation for Mississippi has been part of the effort, Entergy has put in environmental funding, and AARP is involved through amenities along the route.

At the north end, an $8 million pedestrian and bicycle bridge broke ground Aug. 19 over Lakeland Drive, where U.S. 25 spreads to as many as 10 lanes. The budget includes $5 million in federal money secured by Sens. Cindy Hyde-Smith and Roger Wicker through the fiscal 2024 transportation appropriations bill, plus state money. The bridge will link the North Jackson Youth Baseball parking lot to Jamie Fowler Boyll Park and put all four museums on one walkable route: the Agriculture and Forestry Museum and the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame on the north side, the Children's Museum and the Museum of Natural Science on the south. WLBT reported in December 2025 that the bridge will connect the Museum Trail with the LeFleur East Trail just east of Smith-Wills Stadium, and that the City Council had granted easements at Boyll Park for it; Michael Flood of the Mississippi Department of Transportation said then that bids were expected in late 2026; the Wire did not find a later update on bidding. WLBT reported the bridge is due to finish 'sometime next year.'

Separately, there is the Eastover Drive leg. In 2021, the Department of Finance and Administration oversaw a $213,000 Hemphill contract to extend a Museum Trail leg along Eastover Drive from where the existing trail on Eastover ended, along Research and Development Center property, to Ridgewood Road. WLBT reported in September 2021 that the notice to proceed was issued July 30 of that year, that the work was expected to finish that November, and that the completed trail would stretch 'from Court Street in downtown Jackson to Eastover Drive in Northeast Jackson.' The Wire did not find a later report confirming when that leg opened.

The Great City Mississippi Foundation, whose executive director is Taylor Nicholas, and the LeFleur's Bluff Conservancy, chaired by Susan Garrard, are behind the bridge. A 2018 LeFleur's Bluff master plan called for more than $10 million in improvements, about $5.5 million of it private, and cited 750,000 visitors to the district. A 2021 study of the museum district put its economic impact at about $10 million in value added, 179 jobs, and $6.5 million in labor income.

Add it up and the Museum Trail has roughly $10 million in identified public and private money across its phases: the $1.6 million original path, the $213,000 Eastover contract, the $588,000 planning grant, and the $8 million bridge budget. Those are budgeted or awarded amounts, not audited spending. The total leaves out the downtown connector, whose cost the Wire has not confirmed, and the unfunded run to Jackson State.

Does a trail move property values? David Pharr of the Jackson Heart Foundation says yes. He has said houses within walking distance of the trail sell for about $10,000 more than houses farther away; that is the foundation's figure, not an appraisal the Wire has reviewed. What the market data shows is a corridor that is rising for reasons that are hard to separate. Redfin put the Belhaven Heights median sale price at $148,000 in early 2026, up 38 percent from a year earlier, and Belhaven's at $266,900 in February, up 25.6 percent. Redfin's samples for both neighborhoods are small, so one month's median can swing on a handful of closings. Nearby employers such as UMMC, Millsaps College and Belhaven University may also be a factor; the Wire has not measured that. The trail is one amenity among several.

The land along the route tells a more concrete story. A Wire review of the Secretary of State's tax-forfeited inventory, exported May 12, 2026, found a cluster of state-held lots on Quinn Street in Belhaven Heights, which the state prices at half of assessed value as its standard. At the planned western end, 67 state-held lots sit within a few blocks of Jackson State; the western leg has a planning grant and no construction money the Wire found, and WLBT reported the rest of the network could take up to three more years. The Wire has not confirmed whether those lots are vacant, but parcels with nothing on them are where trail proximity would matter most, because the question is whether anyone will build. At the north end, The District at Eastover, at Eastover Drive and I-55, is near the LeFleur East Trail.

Now the BeltLine comparison. Atlanta's BeltLine is a 22-mile loop of trails built on a ring of old rail corridors around the city's core, and a study released in May by Econsult Solutions put the numbers this way: about $941 million in public and philanthropic spending since 2005 has been accompanied by $14.2 billion in private investment along the corridor, against an original goal of $10 billion. The study counted 318 completed projects and 93 more in the pipeline, 91,000 jobs tied to the corridor, $23 billion in economic output in 2025, and roughly $31 million in city and $101 million in state tax revenue that year. The Eastside Trail, which opened in 2012 through Old Fourth Ward and Inman Park, is credited with catalyzing more than $638 million in private investment in its portion of the tax allocation district.

The similarities are real but limited. Both projects turned old rail corridors into paved paths, both combine public money with philanthropy, and both are promoted by their backers as economic development rather than recreation. The differences are bigger. The BeltLine is 22 miles through neighborhoods far denser than Jackson's. The planned Museum Trail network would run about six miles from Jackson State to LeFleur's Bluff State Park, past a museum district, Belhaven, and a rail edge downtown. The BeltLine was financed by a tax allocation district, Georgia's version of tax increment financing, that captures the growth in property taxes along the corridor and plows it back into construction. The Wire found no comparable capture tied to the trail on the record. The city has used tax increment financing on individual projects and has a Capitol Complex Improvement District with its own state funding downtown, but nothing that dedicates the trail's own property-tax growth to extending it. And Atlanta has had a long-running debate over affordability and displacement along the BeltLine, a debate that comes with growth at a scale Jackson's corridor has not seen.

The Wire's assessment is that the Museum Trail is a project with about $10 million in identified funding in a city whose core problems are water, population loss, and a shrinking tax base. It will not by itself produce a BeltLine. What it can do is narrower and worth watching: connect the museums into one district visitors can walk, give Belhaven Heights and the Depot blocks a reason to be seen, and, if the western leg is ever funded, put a paved connection across the railroad that divides Jackson State from downtown.

What's next: Construction on the Capitol Green Connector is expected to finish this month, and the Lakeland Drive bridge is due sometime in 2027. The western extension to Jackson State has a planning grant and no construction money the Wire could find; a construction funding source, such as a federal grant or a line in the city's capital budget, would be the next step. The Wire will track both on the Pipeline.