The Mississippi Delta 34: 2012 Road Trip through the Central Delta

Here are some photographs from a short trip through the southern and central Mississippi Delta in March of 2012. I often used digital equipment at this time but still took a film camera with me when I looked for interesting topics.

Boyle

Boyle is in Bolivar County, Mississippi, just a short distance south of Cleveland. Catfish is, or at least was, a big business. I expect most people drive by quickly on US 61/US 278 heading to or from Cleveland, where Delta State University is located. There is not too much to see in Boyle. But south of town, I saw the sun shining on a cluster of old gravestones just off 278. I could not find a name for the graveyard. If any readers can identify the site, please let me know.

Mound Bayou

Mound Bayou, about 10 miles north of Cleveland, has an interesting history in that it was a town founded by former slaves. I wrote about Mound Bayou before in The Mississippi Delta 8 and The Mississippi Delta 8b. The history of this town is a story of determination, back-breaking hard work, and a dream of creating a better life for African Americans in an era when they were treated brutally by the southern white political establishment and the klan.

The Taborian Hospital was founded by the International Order of Twelve Knights and Daughters of Tabor, a fraternal organization. For over twenty years, the hospital provided low-cost health care to African-Americans in the Mississippi Delta in an era when most public hospitals would only admit white patients. When I took these pictures in March 2012, the Taborian Hospital had been closed for almost two decades. From 2012 to 2015, the hospital was renovated, cleaned, and reopened as an urgent care facility. Preservation in Mississippi wrote about the progress in 2012 and 2016. But as of 2018, it was closed again! The facility is mired in some sort of lawsuit, and there is minimal information on the web about what is happening. All that money and effort wasted?

Shelby

Shelby is another town in Bolivar County. It has (had) more of a downtown that many other Delta towns, but today much of Shelby is pretty rough. I wrote about Shelby before in The Mississippi Delta 9. I will return some day and look around some more.

Hushpuckena

Former general store (Panatomic-X, Fuji GW690II, no filter)

Interior of store with discarded medical records (Panasonic G-1 digital file converted to B&W)

Old store in Hushpuchena (Panasonic G-1 digital file converted to B&W)

Hushpuckena is an unincorporated community - really a former town - about 4 miles north of Shelby. A friend's uncle suggested I take a look and he was right. The former commercial strip faced Old 49, which is now a partly overgrown country lane. I included an interior picture from my digital camera because the papers all over the floor were 1980s medical records from Bolivar County Hospital. I told a doctor friend of mine from Greenville, and he recovered and destroyed the records. He said he recognized some nurses on his staff.

This ends our very short 2012 drive through the central Delta. All these photographs except the two digital Hushpuckena files are from Kodak Panatomic-X film taken with my Fuji GW690II camera with EBC Fujinon 90mm ƒ/3.5 lens. I used a tripod to support the camera for all these frames.

The Mississippi Delta 8b: The I.T. Montgomery House, Mound Bayou (B&W film)

Mound Bayou is a historic town in Bolivar County, Mississippi.

I.T Montgomery house, W. Main  Street, Mound Bayou, Mississippi

The always-informative Preservation in Mississippi blog recently wrote that the National Trust for Historic Preservation had announced its annual “America’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places” for 2018. Isaiah T. Montgomery's House in Mound Bayou was on the list. From the National Trust:

"Isaiah T. Montgomery House Mound Bayou, Mississippi. Established by former slave Isaiah T. Montgomery, Mound Bayou was one of the earliest all-black municipalities, located in the Mississippi Delta following the Civil War. Today, Montgomery's home is in urgent need of stabilization and rehabilitation."

I wrote about Mound Bayou in 2012, and at that time, I.T. Montgomery's house looked intact, although I was not able to see inside.

Undated photograph of I.T. Montgomery house from Mississippi Department of Archives and History.

During an April 2018 drive through Mound Bayou, I saw some workmen installing heavy timbers abound the periphery of the house to prevent the walls from collapsing outwards. They did not know if other preservation work would follow. The lower floor of the house served as a clinic in the early 20th century.

Edwards Ave. (Old Hwy. 61), view south, Mound Bayou, Mississippi

Today, Mound Bayou looks rough and beat-up. The main road through town, Edwards Avenue, has the standard closed shops and shop-a-minute gas stations.

The former bus stop on Edwards Ave. is an early-20th century shop with square front.

Willie's transmission appears to be closed. You can see the I.T. Montgomery house a block away on the left.

This building at the corner of W. Main and Green Streets was the Bank of Mound Bayou, founded by Charles Banks in 1904, the first Black-owned bank in Mississippi.

The historic Taborian Hospital was closed for decades, then restored, and now is closed again. It is sad.

The history of Mound Bayou is a story of determination, back-breaking hard work, and a dream of creating a better life for African Americans in an era when they were treated brutally by the Southern white political establishment. National Public Radio featured Mound Bayou in one of their 2017 Our Land series. Booker T. Washington wrote a fascinating description of Mound Bayou's founding and early history in an article titled, "A Town Owned by Negroes, Mound Bayou, Miss., an Example of Thrift and Self-Government," July 1907 (archive from from Johns Hopkins Press).

The black and white photographs are from Kodak TMax 100 film, exposed with a Pentax Spotmatic camera (1971 vintage). I scanned the negatives with a Plustek 7600i film scanner controlled with Silverfast Ai software.

The Mississippi Delta 8: Mound Bayou

The city of Mound Bayou, in Bolivar County, is the next stop in our ongoing tour of the Mississippi Delta. Mound Bayou has an interesting history in that it was founded for and by former slaves. According to Wikipedia,

"Mound Bayou traces its origin to people from the community of Davis Bend, Mississippi. The latter was started in the 1820s by the planter Joseph E. Davis, who intended to create a model slave community on his plantation. Davis was influenced by the utopian ideas of Robert Owen. He encouraged self-leadership in the slave community, provided a higher standard of nutrition and health and dental care, and allowed slaves to become merchants. 

In the aftermath of the American Civil War, Davis Bend became an autonomous free community when Davis sold his property to former slave Benjamin Montgomery, who had run a store and been a prominent leader at Davis Bend. The prolonged agricultural depression, falling cotton prices and white hostility in the region contributed to the economic failure of Davis Bend. 

Isaiah T. Montgomery led the founding of Mound Bayou in 1887 in wilderness in northwest Mississippi. The bottomlands of the Delta were a relatively undeveloped frontier, and blacks had a chance to clear land and acquire ownership in such frontier areas. By 1900 two-thirds of the owners of land in the bottomlands were black farmers. With high debt and continuing agricultural problems, most of them lost their land and by 1920 were sharecroppers. As cotton prices fell, the town suffered a severe economic decline in the 1920s and 1930s."

This is Isaiah Montgomery's house on East Main Street. It is now closed and semi-secured. The undated black and white photograph is from the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. I think there is a horse grazing in the side yard, in keeping with he spirit of this town being the center of an agricultural community.

Mound Bayou has seen more prosperous days. Just north of Isaiah Montgomery's home is an abandoned low-income housing unit.


Further north on North Edwards Avenue is the historical Taborian Hospital, now closed. The hospital was founded by the International Order of Twelve Knights and Daughters of Tabor, a fraternal organization. For over twenty years, the hospital provided low-cost health care to thousands of African-Americans in the Mississippi Delta. This was one of two hospitals in the delta dedicated to serving this population group in an era when most public hospitals would only admit white patients. The other facility was the Afro-American Sons and Daughters Hospital in Yazoo City, featured in a November 2010 essay.


The Taborian Hospital opened in 1942. All members of the staff, including doctors and nurses, were black. Equipment included two operating rooms, an x-ray machine, incubators, electrocardiograph, blood bank, and laboratory. Operating funds were generated almost entirely from membership dues in the International Order and from voluntary contributions. The hospital closed in 1983, after years of financial pressures. As you can see in the last two photographs, the building is deteriorating and the interior is a mess.

The Preservation in Mississippi blog featured the Taborian Hospital in 2010. The following paper provides more background:

Smith, A.R.J.,  2003. Managed health care: the Taborian Hospital experience, 1942-1983. Journal of the National Medical Association, J. Natl. Med. Assoc. 95(1): 84–89 (avail. online, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2594372/ , accessed February 6, 2013). 

In 2000, Mississippi Heritage Trust placed Taborian Hospital on its 10 Most Endangered Places list. A rural development grant may revive the building, but I do not know when this will happen.

A 2012 article in Preservation in Mississippi has fascinating interior photographs taken before cleanup and restoration.

Here is a Mound Bayou photograph by Lee Russell from the Library of Congress:

"Title: Negros going to church, Mound Bayou, Mississippi
Creator(s): Lee, Russell, 1903-1986, photographer
Date Created/Published: 1939 Jan.
Medium: 1 negative : nitrate ; 35 mm.
Reproduction Number: LC-DIG-fsa-8a25117 (digital file from original) LC-USF33-011972-M2 (b&w film nitrate neg.)"

Heading north near Highway 61 are some run-down farm buildings.

Across the road, the flooded fields provide nice reflections.

Photographs taken March 10, 2012 with a Panasonic G1 digital camera with polarizing filter.

Update: here are two black and white film photographs of the Taborian Hospital. These are from Kodak Panatomic-X film exposed with a Fuji GW690II camera with 90mm ƒ/3.5 lens. I cleaned chemical blobs and lint using the heal tool in Photoshop CS5.