Crumbling: the Yazoo County Agricultural High School, Benton Mississippi

In August of 2009, Mississippi Preservation wrote about the abandoned Yazoo County Agricultural High School in Benton, MS. This inspired me to visit Benton with an out-of-town friend who shares my interest in exploring fading architecture and the remnants of our industrial society. We did not expect much but were disappointed to see that: 1. The 1930-vintage brick school building is deteriorating quickly; 2. The wood building housing treachers' apartments had just been demolished.

The brick building, built in 1930 by Lumbergh & Hayes (Canton architects/builders), had the classic school architecture with large windows to let in light and, in a pre-air conditioning era, fresh air. I like the arch over the main door. Students pass through with a sense that they are entering an important place. Also, windows allow the students to have a connection with nature, so much nicer than modern mega-schools that resemble prisons.

From the outside, the building appears sound, but look in through the windows and the deterioration is evident. The main hallway runs longitudinally through the building. Transoms would have allowed air flow on hot days. Notice the radiator, originally for a hot water or steam heat system.



The rooms were high-ceilinged and had been painted with the ghastly industrial green pigment (the stuff that resists body fluids). Notice in last photograph, the floor has caved in and fallen down to the former crawl space.

The wood teachers' apartment building had just been razed. I met the owner of the property, a builder (investor?) from Vicksburg. He recently bought the land from Yazoo County and had to knock down the wood building because it was imploding and dangerous. He was concerned that vagrants might get hurt in it. As you can see in the photograph above, all that is left is a pile of sticks and rubble. I'm surprised they could not recycle joists, but maybe the rot or termite damage was too extensive. The owner said someone had approached him to buy the bricks in the school building, but he was not interested in the offer.

Some of the books were rather interesting, basic science texts without the fluff and political correctness idiocy found in contemporary textbooks. Who read these books, and did they continue on to college?

All photographs taken with a Sony DSC-R1 digital camera, tripod-mounted. Hint: always use a tripod for architecture and static subjects.

For more information: Mississippi Preservation

The Bonner Campbell Institute, Edwards, Mississippi

The Bonner Campbell Institute, formerly the Southern Christian Institute, sits on a bucolic piece of property off Hwy 80 west of Edwards, Mississippi. The Preservation in Mississippi blog recently presented an excellent historical summary on the Institute:
http://misspreservation.com/2010/12/01/abandoned-mississippi-southern-christian-institute/

The essay inspired me to return and look around the site. I had driven past on Hwy 80 many times before, but the gate was always closed and I never saw any activity there. But a couple of Sundays ago, the gate was open, the light was mellow, and it seemed like a good afternoon to explore.


The land is beautiful. Hawks and turkey vultures soar overhead, song birds twitter in the trees, the oaks are full and luxurious. Someone mows the grass, but the place still has a "Land that Time Forgot" feel to it. As E.L. Malveney wrote, "The campus again saw new life when it became Bonner Campbell School of Religion, an arm of the A.M.E. denomination, in 1971. Used mainly for church retreats, but also more regularly as a Head Start center until around 2000, the owners have struggled in recent years to keep the campus up." Sadly, this last sentence says it all. The buildings, which look reasonably intact from a distance, are all suffering for decay, storm damage, and some degree of vandalism.


The first structure you come to is a handsome 2-story pillared building with wrap-around porches. This was Smith Hall, a girl's dormitory. Part of the roof on the north side has collapsed and the porches are rotting. (Update January 2018: this building no longer exists.)



The inside was elegant in its day. Look at this handsome room with multi-paneled pine doors, but it does feature the infamous institutional lime green paint.


Allison Hall was the kitchen and cafeteria complex. An older 2-story building is to the rear, with a newer 1-floor cafeteria in front. Both were faced with concrete blocks molded to look like cut stone.


Here, too, some pretty serious decay is underway. A tree limb crashed through the roof of the cafeteria and the interior is open to rain and the elements.


I ventured inside and saw typical institutional halls and toilets. But these ones were blue, not the sickening green you see in most institutions.


The building in the back contained living quarters, I presume for the cook staff. I've seen much worse, making me think these building were intact and occupied less than 10 years ago.


Proceeding south (further away from Hwy 80), you come to the brick 1926-vintage Administration Building. Many of the windows have been broken and partly fixed with wood panels. The few interior rooms I could see were just like early 20th century schoolrooms you can see around the country. A couple of administration-looking offices were sided with nasty cheap dark paneling. As you can see from the plaque, funds for the college came from around the country.

The building furthest south is Belding Hall, the former boys' dormitory (1935-vintage). It looked like it was in the best condition of the historic buildings, but I was unable to see inside.

I don't know what to say. It's a beautiful site. But who could afford to restore the buildings? Most modern conference centers want contemporary energy-efficient climate-controlled buildings.

All photographs taken with a Sony DSC-R1 camera, tripod-mounted. I also used traditional Panatomic-X black and white film in a Fuji 6x9 camera but have not processed the film yet. For the monochrome frames above, I processed the Sony RAW files in Phase One's Capture One 4 software, which does a very nice job in taming high contrast and recovering highlights. I then resized, sharpened, and converted to sepia with ACDSee ProV2.5 software.

Deserted cement silos in Redwood, Mississippi

Redwood is a small town north of Vicksburg at the junction of Highways 61 and 3 and the Yazoo River. Driving north on Highway 3, just before you reach the International Paper plant, sits a deserted silo and some steel sheds.

I do not recall the facility being used in at least a decade. It's site near a bend in the Yazoo River indicates that the operators once could load product onto barges.

Grain elevators (and silos in general) have a following among photographers in the Midwest. They represent a functional architecture without decoration, noble in their plainness and single-purpose design. At this site, the silos consist of concrete cylinders held together with wire (or rebar) bands. Definitely crude but strong.

Pigeons live here, and maybe some snakes, but there is not much else other than the deserted machinery. I need to return with a 4×5" film camera for some real photography.

A few years ago, I saw this deserted store off Highway 3. It was rather overgrown then and obviously had not been used in years. On my last drive north to Yazoo City I did not see it, but may have forgotten where to look. (May 2020 update: the store is no longer extant.)

(Black and white photographs based on RAW files from a Sony DSC-R1 camera, processed in Capture One LE software).