Abandoned Hinds County School, Utica, Mississippi

Just south of the Morning Star Baptist Church at the junction of Old Port Gibson and Adams Station Roads is a one-floor, two-room cinder block school building. It has been unused for at least a decade, and part of the roof is collapsing.

This was a basic cinderblock building with steel push-out windows.

Windows facing the south let in plenty of sunshine.

My friend from Utica told me that many of these simple, two-room schools were built in the late-1960s - early 1970s for the Head Start program. They were funded by Lyndon Johnson's Great Society program in the late 1960s. According to Wikipedia,

The most important educational component of the Great Society was the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, designed by Commissioner of Education Francis Keppel. It was signed into law on April 11, 1965, less than three months after it was introduced. It ended a long-standing political taboo by providing significant federal aid to public education, initially allotting more than $1 billion to help schools purchase materials and start special education programs to schools with a high concentration of low-income children. During its first year of operation, the Act authorized a $1.1 billion program of grants to states, for allocations to school districts with large numbers of children of low income families, funds to use community facilities for education within the entire community, funds to improve educational research and to strengthen state departments of education, and grants for purchase of books and library materials. The Act also established Head Start, which had originally been started by the Office of Economic Opportunity as an eight-week summer program, as a permanent program.

The inside is a mess, with stacked up old furniture and piles of papers.

There are even two pianos waiting for restoration. Much of this furniture may be from the Morning Star church, using this as a convenient storage shed.

 

As a photographer, I love the patterns of shadow and light around furniture.

 

The roof is collapsing over the small side rooms that contained the toilets.

Schools tell us a lot about our society, our respect for learning, and about our optimism for the future. I am glad some one built this modest little facility but am sad it was abandoned. Hopefully, the contemporary Head Start children have a better facility. If any readers have more information about this and other schools, please let me know.

If you are interested in some other abandoned schools:

Utica High School
The Speed Street school in Vicksburg
Two-room schoolhouse in Carpenter
Yazoo County Ag. High School, Benton

The Bonner Campbell Institute, Edwards

I took these digital frames with a tripod-mounted Fuji X-E1 digital camera and the 27 mm ƒ/2.8 lens.  The little Fuji does a nice job with color balance inside. 

Update December 2020: Mississippi Department of Archives and History sponsored a renovation of the school. It has been re-roofed and repainted. Some windows are covered with plywood panels. Ultimate use: unknown.

Morning Star Country Store, Old Port Gibson Road, Utica, Mississippi

Another former country store sits at the corner of Old Port Gibson and Adams Station Roads near Utica. It is across the street from the Morning Star Baptist Church, whose address is 11449 Old Port Gibson Rd, Utica, Mississippi.

Morning Star store, Old Port Gibson Road, Utica

I am not sure if the store shared the Morning Star name, but that works well and locals will know what you mean.

The inside has a lot of old stuff on the shelves, and the roof is beginning to fail.  I am often surprised how these old stores look as if the proprietors one day decided not to open, abandoning papers, furniture, and materials in place.

My Utica friend told me that the owners once lived in this little cabin just off to the side of the store.  I thought it looked like a tiny motel unit with two rooms.

These are digital images from a Panasonic G3 digital camera with a 20 mm ƒ/1.7 Lumix lens.

UPDATE DEC. 2019: The store is still standing, but is in poor condition. Here are two views from a sunny day, taken on black and white film.

Morning Star store (Panatomic-X film, Hasselblad 501CM, 80mm ƒ/2.8 Planar-CB lens, yellow filter

Yates Country Store, Utica, Mississippi

Country stores once abounded in rural Mississippi. In an era before everyone owned their own car, rural people walked or rode a carriage to the country store to buy seed, tools, groceries, books, a newspaper, candies, or to make a telephone call. In 2011, I wrote about the Betigheimer store on Hwy 27, long gone. This one is near Utica: the W.B. Yates store, at the junction of Old Port Gibson and Cayuga Roads.

W.B. Yates store, Old Port Gibson Road

This is a rather basic cinder-block structure with the squared-off front that is so common on stores and commercial buildings in early-20th century rural areas.  The grey paint makes the place more severe, but the Coca-Cola sign adds a splash of red.

I could not go inside, and all the windows were blocked with plywood.

While I was putting my tripod away, an elderly gent came by to talk. He was a relative of the Yates family. He said the present store was built in 1947 (that explains the post-war cinder blocks). The original store was across the street where a post-war suburban home now sits. Mr. Yates died in 1986 and Mrs. Yates operated the store for two more years. She died tragically when she was hit by an 18-wheeler.

The name Cayuga, as in Cayuga Road, is an Indian name. The European settlers to this area came from upstate New York, where Cayuga Lake is the longest of the glacial-derived Finger Lakes. This is different than Cuyahoga, which is the name of the river that flows through Cleveland and debouches into Lake Erie.

The gent had some other interesting stories. Nearby is Charlie Brown Road. People kept stealing the sign, and the highway department could not figure out why. He convinced them to print a sign "C Brown," and the theft problem ended.

These are digital images from a Panasonic G3 digital camera and a 1949-vintage Leica 5cm ƒ/2.0 Summitar lens, tripod-mounted. My father bought the Summitar and its accompanying Leica IIIC rangefinder camera new at the Post Exchange on Guam. Stopped down to ƒ/4.0 or so, this lens equals many contemporary optics.

Update December 2019: A cabinet-maker and carpenter is using the Yates store. We chatted for a few minutes, and he said he was very busy with projects. Good news!

W.B. Yates Store (Panatomic-X film, Hasselblad 501CM camera, 80mm ƒ/2.8 Planar-CB lens, yellow filter)