The Mississippi Delta 15: Sherard

Continuing our tour of the Mississippi Delta:  drive west out of Clarksdale along Highway 322 (also called Sherard Road), and at the junction of 322 and Highway 1 sits a cluster of houses, trailers, and an abandoned cotton gin.  This is (or was) Sherard.

On 322, here is another small church.  I assume the Pastor's home is attached to the back.

The gin is abandoned. That's sad because I am sure it was once one of the major sources of revenue in a small town.

The J.F. Sherard company's buildings were at the junction of Highways 322 and 1.  A Google search lists the company as a supplier of farm equipment with a current address in Clarksdale.  The buildings were sound, so probably had not been empty for too many years.

The tiny steel shed was rather neat.  It is hard to tell what it might have once housed.

All photographs taken with a Panasonic G1 digital camera with Panasonic Lumix 20 mm f/1.7 lens.

The Mississippi Delta 14: Hollandale

Travel north on Highway 61 from Rolling Fork, and the next "big" town that you reach is Hollandale. According to Wikipedia, the town was almost totally burned in 1904, so I assume most of the buildings you see in the downtown strip are newer.

City Drug on Hwy 12 (Washington Street), Hollandale

There was once a cheerful and prosperous commercial strip.  I left these photographs of the City Drug Store in color because the tones and textures were mellow in the evening light.

Hitghway 12 (Washington Street), Hollandale

The strip is mostly boarded up.  But you can see that the merchants were proud of their buildings in the early 20th century.  I met a couple who said they were trying to bring art and cultural tourists to Hollandale.  They were hoping to entice people on blues tours to stop. The big problem: lack of amenities like restaurants.

I am not sure how this big wood mansion was once used - a rooming house possibly?

Abandoned oil mill west of Hollandale

Abandoned oil mill, Hollandale

Just west of the railroad tracks, the oil mill is deserted.

Finally, here is a small church on Highway 61.  It is in nice condition, but much of the rest of town is forlorn.

This is a photograph of the "Y and M. V. R. R. Station, Hollandale, Miss. 4-30-27" from the Mississippi Department of archives and History.  A vast area of the Delta was flooded in 1927.

Modern photographs taken with a Panasonic G1 digital camera.  For the square frames, I processed the RAW files with Photo Ninja software.

The Mississippi Delta 13: Anguilla

Anguilla is a cluster of houses and some trees on Highway 61 (the Blues Highway) just a couple of miles north of Rolling Fork, Mississippi.  South of town are some farm road that intersect 61, and on one one of these, Southdale Road, stands a classic rural wooden church.

The Southdale Church is unused now but is still in decent condition.  There are dozens of churches like this scattered across the Delta.

Turn around and face north, and you can see why the Delta was so famous for its rich soil. And most of it is a flat, with only a few Indian mounds and some natural river levees to break the horizon.

A few years ago, I photographed this deserted farm workers' house somewhere in Anguilla, but I can't recall the exact location.  Many of these isolated houses are now empty and slowly crumbling and decaying. A legacy of our past is disappearing.

About 4 miles north of Anguilla, you reach the small town of Nitta Yuma. Here is another country church, perched at the edge of the fields. Nitta Yuma was once much more populated, but now has very few residents.

This formerly magnificent mansion in Nitta Yuma belonged to the Crump family. Nellie Crump came from good stock and was a regular guest of the President, staying in Blair House. Nellie's mansion had electricity before the White House did. After Nellie died, two descendants dug up floors and tore out parts of walls, looking for gold that was purported to be hidden somewhere. The house has been crumbling steadily over the decades. This is how we lose our architectural heritage.

2013 photographs taken with a Panasonic G1 camera with 14-45 mm lens, tripod-mounted. The 2008 photographs were from a Olympus E-330 digital camera.

The Mississippi Delta 12: Clarksdale

This is essay no. 12 in my occasional series on the Mississippi Delta.

Clarksdale is the county seat of Coahoma County, the big city in the northern part of the Delta. In the early-mid-20th century, it was a bustling and prosperous agricultural, trade, railroad, and mercantile center. Feeding all this commerce were shops, office buildings, railroad repair shops, warehouses, and a thriving music culture. Many people consider Clarksdale to be the home of the Blues, and many famous Blues musicians either came from Clarksdale or got their start there.  Clarksdale had a thriving Jewish and Lebanese community in the early 20th century.

Today Clarksdale looks sad and beat-up, like many other Delta towns. The downtown commercial center is almost empty, shops are shuttered, and there is almost no traffic on a Saturday. I only spent part of a cold Saturday there, and surely missed many interesting places, but what I did see shows the town's rich cultural and commercial heritage.

First of all, where do you eat when you come to town on a cold, gloomy day, with wisps of snow in the air? You go for a big plate of ribs at Abe's Bar-B-Q at 606 North State Street. Abe's has been in business since 1924 and I suppose the tender ribs I ate have been smoking since then. Other than Abe's and a few other eateries, State Street looks rather forlorn.

Head north on Desoto Avenue and then turn left on 4th Street (also known as Martin Luther King Blvd.), and you head towards the Sunflower River and the old commercial heart of Clarksdale.

Unused railroad shed off Leflore Avenue

Turn right on Leflore Avenue, and you see a red railroad repair shed near the road. I can't tell if it is in use, but the dead locomotive has been sitting there a long time and the office is full of junk

Leflore Ave. has empty lots, abandoned houses, and gin bottles in the grass.

Yazoo Avenue, which is perpendicular to 4th Street, is pretty dilapidated in this area. Most of the shops are shuttered or imploding.

Proceed a couple of blocks closer to the river, and you reach Sunflower Avenue. At the corner was a former shop with the 45-degree corner facing the intersection. The former music center appears to be a lounge now.

Across the street is the historic Heavenly Rest cemetery. This is the resting place of merchants and prominent families - evidence of Clarksdale's wealthy past.

Turn the corner to 3rd Street and Delta Avenue, and you see some older commercial buildings with cheerful paint and some restoration. It is nice to see some degree of revival, but many of the storefronts here are still empty.

These are digital images from a Panasonic G1 camera and the superb Panasonic 20mm ƒ/1.7 Lumix lens. I processed some of the RAW files with Photo Ninja software to render them as black and white.

For older posts on the Mississippi Delta, please click the links below:

• Duncan
• Alligator
• Hushpuckena
• Mound Bayou
• Boyle
• Leland
• Arcola
• Greenville
• Rolling Fork
• Yazoo City
• Mt. Holly

To see the funky Shack-Up Inn, please click this link. 

The Secret Playground, Vicksburg, Mississippi

This essay could be named The Secret Garden (apologies to Frances Hodgson Burnett), but I will call it The Secret Playground. A couple of weeks ago, my old car suffered a breakdown at the corner of Wisconsin and Confederate Avenues, near Toots Grocery, in Vicksburg. I coasted into the parking lot of the New Mt. Elem Church at 3014 Wisconsin Avenue. While waiting for a flatbed truck, I walked up a dirt path that led away from the church lot, rounded a corner, and came across a semi-abandoned playground.

The first play machine you encounter is the merry-go-round. It still turns, so someone must have maintained it within the last decade or so. The site is not totally overgrown, so does someone cut the brush possibly annually?

The slide is reasonably intact, a slide to nowhere.

This is sturdy, old-fashioned playground equipment made of heavy-duty steel.  The nearby bench has survived the years.

Here is one of the children's seats. I remember these massive things from the 1950s, when they would have been equipped with a chain and a hook to keep a child from falling out.

I showed these photographs to several coworkers who lived all their lives in Vicksburg, and none knew anything about the site. It was too far from the old Ken Karyl School (now the Vicksburg Family Life Church) and across a busy street to have been associated with the school. If anyone has any information, please comment.

Update, March 23, 2013: I spoke to an old friend, a retired City of Vicksburg employee, about this site. He said it was still an official city playground but was not sure if the Parks and Recreation Department maintained the site any more. He recalled buying some of the playground equipment many years ago. He said the access road was once one of the National Military Park loops, but when the City and Federal Government exchanged land, part of Confederate Avenue was relocated and the city built the playground on the loop.

For a 2014 update: Click Here.

Photographs taken with a Panasonic G3 digital camera with Lumix 20mm f/1.7 lens. On this camera, I can set the aspect ratio to 1:1, which lets me frame square. I learned to appreciate the square viewpoint after using Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex cameras for 30 years. Raw files processed with Photo Ninja software on a Mac computer. I recommend Photo Ninja highly (but I recommend using real film in a Rolleiflex even more highly).

For some genuine film pictures: Click here