The Mississippi Delta 19: Into the Woods in Redwood (B&W film)

Redwood is a small community north of Vicksburg on Hwy. US 61 (the "Blues Highway"). Most people rush by heading to Eagle Lake or Yazoo City, but there are some interesting photographic topics (well, if you like old things, as I do). Redwood is at the southern margin of the Mississippi Delta; north and west of here stretch the flat farmlands and hardwood bottomland of the Mississippi River's alluvial plain.

Abandoned cement silo off Rte. 3 (35mm film, Pentax Spotmatic camera, 35mm Super-Takumar lens)

US 61 swings west after it crosses the Yazoo River, while MS Hwy. 3 proceeds north to Yazoo City. The hulking abandoned cement silos are just off Hwy. 3 about a mile south of the Vicksburg International Paper Mill. I have photographed these silos before. The tracks serve the paper mill and a rail yard further north.

Quite by chance, I drove up a dirt road across the highway from the silos and found this abandoned concrete structure and some sort of crushing mill. I am not sure what it once crushed. It resembles a giant version of the incense burners you see in monasteries in the Himalaya in Nepal.

Hmmm, a snake lives in the pond underneath the concrete frame. Was water from the pond once used in the crushing process? By mid-spring, poison ivy takes over.

There are a couple of abandoned houses along Rte. 3, but nothing too interesting.

Just north of the International Paper plant, the rails fan out into a rail yard, with a lot of parked rolling stock. The tracks end, and I do not know if they once continued north to Yazoo City. The photograph above is the view looking south, with the paper plant at the horizon.

I took most of the square photographs with a Rolleiflex 3.5E camera with 75mm ƒ/3.5 Xenotar lens, tripod-mounted. The film was Kodak Panatomic-X, with expiration date 1989, but it still performs perfectly. I wrote about Panatomic-X earlier this year. The close-up of the crushing mill was from a Mamiya C220 camera with 55mm Mamiya lens on Kodak Tri-X Professional 320 film. I previously wrote about the silos in 2010 and in 2017.