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| Former Knitting Mill, S. Green St., Tupelo, Mississippi |
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| Knitting Mill from S. Spring St., Tupelo |
Dear Readers, I am continuing my ongoing exploration of towns in Mississippi with this short visit to Tupelo.
Tupelo is a city in northeast Mississippi just off the Natchez Trace Parkway. In the early 20th century, the city was a major cotton processing center, as demonstrated by huge brick mills. They are now mostly unused but may have future life as apartments, stores, or wedding/party venues. (I am specifically not using the term "repurposing," which is trendy today.)
These postcards from the Cooper Postcard Collection at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History give you an idea of the industrial power of cotton processing early in the 20th century.
I stayed in Tupelo in May of 2018 and spent a morning exploring.
The Tupelo Cotton Mill (300 Elliott Street) formerly housed a wholesale supplier but now is being used as an event venue. I could not go in but walked around the hulking building.
A shed across the parking lot housed a serious coffee roaster.
The Gravlee Lumber Company on Spring Street has closed. I can't tell if this part of town is being revitalized or not.
Some interesting old industrial equipment was on the lot next to Gravlee Lumber.
Oh oh, Elvis is back. Maybe he never left. After all, he was born here in Tupelo.
The BNSF (Burlington Northern Santa Fe) and KCS (Kansas City Southern) cross lines at an interesting X-crossing just east of Spring Street.
For now, that is all. Tupelo warrants a return for some more exploring. The rectangle black and white photographs are from 35mm Fuji Acros 100 film in my wife's 1971 Pentax Spotmatic camera with various Pentax Takumar lenses. The two square frames are from Ilford Delta 100 film exposed with my Rolleiflex 3.5E medium format camera with its fabulous 75mm ƒ/3.5 Schneider Xenotar lens.
3 comments:
Hi,
I started to leave a comment about Tupelo, but found that I could not do so with Safari. I then tried Chrome and Firefox with the same result. The problem was that my Google account information was not detected. Now, I have installed Opera and it does show my icon and the Google account info. So let's see what happens.
Well, as I was about to say:
Tupelo has a lot of history going for it.
Also, I am always amazed at the transformation that takes place when I click on one of your black and white pictures. The excellence of your compositions and tonal values really jumps out when the picture is enlarged. Makes me wonder if making the initial picture size larger would provide a better preview of the photos' potential in the fully enlarged size.
Hi Mike, thank you for the compliment. I set the picture size in blogger to "large." If it is larger, such as "original size," the picture will spread out past the margins. But, I will do some more experimenting.
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