Places & Faces: The Alliance of Corinth, Mississippi

Lane Yoder knew the street signs in Corinth, Mississippi were a bit of a mess.

What she didn’t know was the extent of the problem. She needed a simple, cost-effective way to get down to street level and understand the reality on the ground.

Yoder checked street view imagery from some of the best known map providers, and was disappointed to find that many of the roads in her area hadn’t been mapped in 10 years or more. Then she found Bee Maps, powered by Hivemapper, which offered the fresh views she needed.

“There aren’t many solutions out there for maintaining an inventory of street signs, without building that database,” Yoder says. “I was very glad to have come across [Bee Maps, powered by] Hivemapper. It had a map of our community that allowed me to see the streets, follow the streets, assess the signage and create that database.”

Yoder is community director at The Alliance in Corinth, Mississippi. The organization serves as the joint chamber of commerce and community development agency for Corinth, a city of 14,000 people at the northern end of the state, just shy of the Tennessee state line.  

Last spring, The Alliance started working with a research institute at Mississippi State University that advises local governments on how to make their area more attractive to residents, visitors and businesses. The researchers recruited a group of anonymous Mississippians to visit Corinth and share anonymous impressions of the city, like “secret shoppers” at a store or restaurant.

A consistent theme emerged from the feedback.

"We had several people say to us: ‘You cannot find your way around this community because it doesn’t have proper street signage,’” Yoder recalls. 

Many longtime residents, like Yoder, knew their way around Corinth from memory. They would hardly notice a missing or mismatched street sign. But the newcomers, with their fresh eyes, made clear that Corinth needed to improve its signage to make the city more welcoming.

There was a problem: Corinth didn’t have an inventory of all of its signage, and it didn’t have the resources to commission a survey. Yoder, who was leading the effort to improve the signage, didn’t have time to drive all over town and take stock – she wanted to find a digital version.

The dated imagery from the best-known street view service wasn’t good enough. For example, a church in the historic city center was destroyed in a fire several years ago, but in the last capture, more than 10 years ago, the church was still standing.

Yoder turned to Bee Maps. It offered fresher imagery, and when it wasn’t available, Yoder used the Bursts feature – which allows a map data user to create a targeted bounty that encourages a map contributor passing through the area to go map a location of interest. 

Using the Scout tool from Bee Maps, Yoder reviewed fresh imagery for the entire historic center of Corinth and was able to quickly assess the reality on the ground. 

Some street signs were black; others were green. Some signs were mounted on PVC pipe instead of metal poles; others were mounted on concrete pillars that are no longer used because of the danger they pose in a car crash. Some streets had no signs at all.

Yoder even discovered a lingering reminder of the church that had been destroyed in a fire, but was still visible on some street-view imagery services. On the blocks surrounding the church, as a reminder of the childcare center that had once called the church home, was an outdated sign: “Caution: Children at Play.”  

Empowered by this information, The Alliance made recommendations to the city government about how to improve the signage in the historic city center. In February 2025, the city announced it was moving forward with a street sign modernization project to address the inconsistency that Yoder documented.

“It will be a multiyear process, but I have already seen them at work changing out the signs, implementing some new crosswalks,” Yoder says. “We are already starting to see the change.”

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