The Mississippi Delta 6: Leland

Leland is a town on U.S. Highway 61 (the Blues Highway) in Washington County, Mississippi. It is an agricultural center with soybeans, cotton, and catfish as its main commodities. Like many Delta towns, it looks like it was much more prosperous 20 or more years ago and is now sleeping in old age.

According to Wikipedia:

"Leland is in the heart of blues country and has produced a number of national and regionally famous blues musicians. Highway 61, mentioned in numerous blues recordings, runs through the town and gives its name to the community's blues museum. Leland is the burial place of the folk artist and blues musician James "Son" Thomas, who lived for many years along the railroad tracks. Thomas is buried beneath a gravestone donated by musician John Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater Revival.

Blues musician Johnny Winter was born in Leland on Feb. 23, 1944, to an Army officer and his wife. Winter is commemmorated on a plaque in the community that is part of the Mississippi Blues Trail.

The community is the birthplace of Kermit the Frog, a Muppet created by Jim Henson, who was born in nearby Greenville. The city has a museum along the banks of Deer Creek celebrating Henson's accomplishments."

Deer Creek runs through town, and some of the magnificent mansions attest to the wealth associated with agriculture in the past. These two are on North and South Deer Creek Drive, west of downtown.

Proceed downtown and you see where a cotton mill was once located. Most of the works have been demolished.



The tracks from the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad (later part of the Illinois Central) once ran north-south through the center of the Delta, but they were removed in the early 1980s. This was standard gauge 4 ft 8 1⁄2 in (1,435 mm) track. The Msrailroads web page has more information about historic Mississippi railroads. The post card from the John Sharp collection is courtesy of Msrailroads (Thanks!)

This is a June 1937 photograph of a cinema in Leland by Dorothea Lange, from the Library of Congress.

Proceed north on Main Street, and many of the shops and the former hotel are closed. As of 2000, this seed store was still in business.

I am not sure of the status of this elevator complex on North Main Street.

Out in the flat country near Dunleith, I photographed this classic little MB church in 2000. This was Mount Elm MB Church, and it was way out in the country, with no homes anywhere nearby.

Photograph note: the church and the feed store are scans of Kodachrome 25 slide film. I took the photographs with a 1949-vintage Leica IIIC rangefinder camera with 50 mm f/2.0 Summitar lens and a polarizer filter. The Summitar was a pre-WWII design and capable of superb results, especially if stopped down to f/4 or smaller. Hint: always use a tripod when photographing architecture. Your subject won't run away from you.

Dec. 2017 update: The Leica IIIC has been repaired and put back into operation (click the link).

Lumber town: Berlin, New Hampshire

Berlin is a mill and paper town on the Androscoggin River in northern New Hampshire. Situated north of the White Mountains, it is about four hours drive from Boston and seems to be far away from anything.

Berlin was once a thriving industrial city. Prosperity in the early 20th century came from timber harvesting, lumber mills, and paper factories. Workers were a mix of ethnic groups, with many being French Canadians. Many families spoke French exclusively, and schools taught English a foreign language. Sadly, since World War II, the town has been on a steady decline, and a large paper mill closed recently.

Immigrant families lived in wood double- and triple-deckers. You find this type of semi-mass-produced housing in former industrial cities like Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Boston, but the architectural style was also used here in New Hampshire. I don't know how residents heated in the past; possibly boilers in the cellar used coal (brought in by railroad). Life in these tenements must have been dreary, but at least the men and women had jobs and dreamed of a better future. Some participated in winter sports. In 1882, a group of Scandinavians founded the nation's first ski club, named the Nansen Ski Club in honor of Fridtjof Nansen, the explorer who in 1888 skied across Greenland. Today, much of this housing stock is seedy and many units are empty.

You can still see elements of a prosperous past. The beautiful Holy Resurrection Orthodox Church overlooks the city from the west side of the valley.

It's interesting that the cornerstone was laid before the Bolshevik revolution.

July 2015 update: a friend sent me an article from the April 25, 2015, Conway Daily Sun,  The article states that the church was built by Russian immigrants who came to Berlin in the early 1900s to work in paper mills. By 1915, there were 300 Russian men in town, and in March of 2015, Father Arcady Piotrowsky of Cleveland was assigned to Berlin to help found the Holy Resurrection Russian Orthodox Greek Catholic Church. (They liked long names then.) The church's icons may have been some of the last to leave Russia before Czar Nicholas II was overthrown. During the 20th century, the parish dwindled, and  the church closed in 1963. It remained empty for 11 years. In 1974, a family of one of the original founders asked to hold the funeral service at the closed church, and parishioners refurbished the domes and paintings. The building was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979.

This factory/warehouse was sheathed with zinc plates patterned to look like cut stone blocks. This type of busy pattern, resembling limestone blocks, must have been popular in the late 1800s because early-vintage cinder blocks were also molded with this design.

I think this kind of sheathing was most commonly used before the 1940s. By the 1960s, aluminum siding became more popular than steel sheathing because it was lighter and easier to install.

I have seen other buildings with zinc sheathing in other parts of the country. One was a church in Johnson City, Texas, where Lyndon Johnson went to services. The old airport terminal near Tallulah, LA, where Delta Airlines started decades ago, had zinc roof tiles shaped to look like clay tiles.

It's sad to see a town like Berlin heading downhill, but what can replace traditional industries that employed a large workforce? Berlin was once called "Papertown,"but that era ended years ago. The last paper mill in northern New Hampshire, the Fraser Papers mill in Gorham, south of the Berlin-Gorham line, just closed. In Berlin's case, prisons provide some employment but the employment numbers are minor compared to the thousands who once cut and processed timber. You can read about Berlin in Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin,_New_Hampshire

All photographs taken with a Fuji F31fd digital camera.

Lost architecture, Martin Luther King Jr., Blvd., Vicksburg, Mississippi

Vicksburg was once a city of many churches. But we have lost many of these elegant wood frame houses of worship over the last decade. The example below was located at 1205 Martin Luther King Jr., Blvd., next to a brick commercial building occupied by Gore's Hardware Store and near the intersection with Main Street.
I do not remember the full story of why the church was dismantled, but I recall some sort of mistake was made in issuing a permit to the property owner. The building dated from the late 1800s and was not supposed to be torn down.
Notice the building's simple but classic symmetry, with a steeple in the center and even rows of windows on all sides. In an earlier era, the windows allowed maximum air flow on hot summer Sundays.
MLK Jr. Blvd. still has some historic architecture, such as the old filling station and warehouse.
The filling station has become Mamma's Super Burgers. Great logo: "You bite the meat before the bun."
I will post more photographs from MLK Jr. Blvd. and more churches in the future.