Lost Small-town Store: Main Street, Vicksburg, Mississippi

For much of the 20th century, many people did not have automobiles, and all towns had local stores to supply staples and groceries. Vicksburg had many of these small stores, but most have disappeared over the years. Williams Gro was at 1620 Main Street. I recall seeing the little shop, but it had been closed for years.

Finally in 2010, the city inspector condemned it along with the house next door. Oddly, both had the address 1620. The spray paint number is the indication that the building has been condemned and that the backhoe will soon crush the hulk.    

Note the Winston sign indicating opening hours and the Holsum bread sign. Holsum had a distributor in Vicksburg years ago.

Technical note: I recently bought an early-2000s Minolta Dimage Scan Multi medium-format scanner. With some manipulation, I got it to work on a Windows 7 computer. I have started testing it with my 6x9 cm 120-size Kodak Panatomic-X negatives, which I expose in a Fujifilm GW690II rangefinder camera (also sometimes known as the "Texas Leica"). This is a big beast of a camera with an astonishing lens. The scans at 2820 dots per inch yield a 100 mb TIFF file. But at that level of detail, I can see lint, flecks of dirt, and non-development spots (probably from bubbles), so it takes some time to retouch the flaws. Dear Readers, in the future, you will see more black and white files from the Texas Leica as I scan my archives.