The Mystery School in Flora, Mississippi

In late December, my wife and I drove through Flora and explored some side streets. On NW 4th Street, we saw a formal Works Progress Administration-style building with eagles. Quick stop, check it out.

A modern sign stated Superintendant's Office. An older sign showed "Flora Middle School." But the building is clearly older than the era of middle schools. Back then, if students in the middle grades had their own building, they were in a junior high school. So how old is this building? Who was the architect? The building is unoccupied now, the main hall behind the door a dusty mess.

Come to find out, there is a mystery as to the exact age of this building. My friend, Suzassippi, wrote about the conflicting origins in her post in Preservation Mississippi. This may be the former high school from 1922. Or, it may be a 1937 building designed by the architect, Overstreet. The high school was torched by the night policeman. Maybe what we see if the remnant of the 3-floor high school, but only partially rebuilt with one floor remaining. Read Suzassippi's article for a much more in-depth review of this building.

This is the 1938 high school, but it looks like a different building to me. The eagles and door mantle are up on a second floor level. Were they moved down one level?

The eagles and medallions look like the decorative elements you see on many Works Progress Administration buildings around the United States. As written in Wikipedia, "the WPA provided jobs and income to the unemployed during the Great Depression in the United States, while developing infrastructure to support the current and future society. At its peak in 1938, it provided paid jobs for three million unemployed men and women, as well as youth in a separate division, the National Youth Administration." In older posts, I wrote about the National Youth gymnasium in Edwards. Regardless of the mystery surrounding the origin of this building in Flora, we see how infrastructure projects in the past helped set the stage for our current society.

These frames are digital images from a Moto G5 mobile phone. (Sorry, no film photographs this time.)

Quiet along the tracks, Bentonia and Flora, Mississippi

Bentonia is a small town in Yazoo County off Highway US 49, about 28 miles northwest of Jackson, Mississippi. The community grew up as an agricultural and postal town along the Illinois Central Railway tracks, which are on the main line between Jackson and Yazoo City. On an overcast November day in 2010, while driving from Yazoo City to Flora, I decided to pull off in Bentonia and look around. It was pretty quiet; not much was happening.

These shops on West Railroad Avenue were closed on the late afternoon when I took the photographs.

Across the tracks on East Railroad Avenue is the famous Blue Front Cafe, a juke joint that played an important role in the Blues tradition and the origin of the "Bentonia Blues." A 2006 USA Today article described the cafe.

Next to the Blue Front was a car repair shop occupying a former cotton gin shed.

The next town south (towards Jackson) is Flora. It also has the look of snoozing the decades away.

These two shops looked unused, especially the sports bar with the bush in front of the door.  Jackson is only a few minutes south on 49, and I suppose most local residents of Flora work and shop in the city. Small-town businesses have a hard time competing.

Photographs taken with a Fujifilm GW690II medium-format rangefinder camera on Kodak Panatomic-X film, developed in Agfa Rodinal developer at 1:50 dilution. I scanned the negatives on a Minolta Scan Multi scanner, cleaned lint and other marks with Faststone, and enhanced contrast and exposure with PhotoNinja software. Click any of the photographs to see a larger version.