Small Towns in Mississippi: Holly Springs

Holly Springs is the county seat of Marshall County, Mississippi. It is near the border with southern Tennessee and is southeast of Memphis. It is in the hill country east of the Mississippi Delta, but its early history was intertwined with cotton cultivation and processing.

Holly Springs Depot, from Cooper Postcard Collection, Mississippi Department of Archives and History.

The post card from the Mississippi Department of Archives and History shows cotton bales stacked near the railroad depot.

The depot, with its distinctive towers is still standing and in good condition. I was there late in the day and the building was empty; I am not sure who uses it. The 1800s brick shed still has railroad equipment in and around it.

Mississippi Industrial College, from Cooper Postcard Collection, Mississippi department of Archives and History

For years, I had wanted to visit Holly Springs to see the remains of the Mississippi Industrial College. According to Hill Country History:

Mississippi Industrial College was an historically black college founded in 1905 by the Mississippi Conference of the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church under the leadership of Bishop Elias Cottrell (1855-1937).  Bishop Cottrell’s goal was to create a college for African Americans and provide them with liberal arts education and industrial training. Mississippi Industrial College’s campus was located on a 120 acre lot, across the street from Rust College, a competing historically black liberal arts school.

Classes began at the College in January of 1906, and in May the school already had over 200 students.  By 1908 Mississippi Industrial College had 450 students.  Mississippi Industrial College was one of the most important black colleges in Mississippi for many decades, until the end of segregation resulted in increasingly low student populations. The college closed in 1982 and remained empty.  During the 1990s, the Holly Springs Police Department and other businesses moved into the newer of the buildings, but they eventually abandoned the property as well.

The once-handsome buildings at the College have been deteriorating for three decades. One of the more modern structures housed the police department and some other city offices for a few years, but I think all campus buildings are empty now.

Preservation Mississippi wrote about the deterioration of the Carnegie Auditorium in 2010. Consider, at one time, the auditorium could seat 1000 people. In a small college in a rural area! The builders had lofty ambitions that they could bring the arts and culture to their students and members of the surrounding community. As of 2018, the building is structurally unsound and dangerous. (The color image above is a digital file.)

Sadly, there is not much left to explore at the site. The historic buildings are unsafe. Notice the stone slab steps.

On Rte 7, we came across an old-fashioned Texaco station, complete with its horizontal stripes on the roof above the pumps. Someone is using the property as a repair shop and storage depot for old trucks.

That is all for Holly Springs. The town was not too inspiring photographically. It suffers from serious poverty and decay. And the historic college is is very poor condition. The black and white photographs are from Kodak TMax 100 film, exposed at EI=80 and developed in Xtol developer. I used my wife's 1971 Pentax Spotmatic camera and scanned the negatives with a Plustek 7600i film scanner.