NATCHEZ, MISSISSIPPI
Mammy's Cupboard
On Highway 61, south of Natchez
Built in 1939 and opened in 1940 on Highway 61 south of Natchez, Mammy's Cupboard has stood over that highway for more than eighty years. Buildings like this don't survive by accident β every generation, somebody decides they're worth keeping. I stopped on Halloween weekend and gave it five minutes. It deserved every one.
VICKSBURG, MISSISSIPPI
The Baer House
Grove Street, Vicksburg
Built in 1870 by Lazarus Baer, the house on Grove Street is one of Vicksburg's great Victorian survivors, all gingerbread trim and Eastlake detail. For Lazarus and his wife Leona, it was home. More than 150 years later it still stands β an inn today, but the Baer name is still on the door.
βLove Is Stronger Than Deathβ
At Anshe Chesed Cemetery, the Baer family plot is watched over by a tall marble monument, carved with an urn and clasped hands. Leona died in 1897. Lazarus followed in 1924. Sam and Blanche Baer rest nearby. The house shows the world they inhabited. The stones tell you who they were.
VICKSBURG, MISSISSIPPI
McRaven
The most haunted house in Mississippi
McRaven isn't one house β it's three, built across half a century on Harrison Street. The oldest rooms went up in 1797 for Andrew Glass, a highwayman who, legend says, was finished off by his own wife. The middle came in 1836, built by Sheriff Stephen Howard for his bride Mary Elizabeth. She died in childbirth there that same year, and people still say they see her on the staircase. The front section, finished in 1849, is the Greek Revival face the house shows the street.
In 1863 the house stood through the Siege of Vicksburg and served as a Confederate hospital. Its owner, John Bobb, was shot by Union soldiers the following year. Later generations never modernized the place, and the last residents, the Murray sisters, lived there until 1960, with the house much as another century had left it. That's why they call it the Time Capsule of the South β and why it carries its other title so easily. After that much living and dying under one roof, a house doesn't empty just because the people are gone.
PORT GIBSON, MISSISSIPPI
Windsor Ruins
Claiborne County, near Port Gibson
Twenty-three Corinthian columns are all that stand of the largest Greek Revival mansion ever built in Mississippi. Windsor was finished in 1861 and survived the Civil War β both armies made use of it β only to burn in 1890, when a guest dropped a cigarette. What's left doesn't feel like a loss, exactly. It feels like the house is still standing watch over the woods that grew up around it. Some places you photograph. Windsor, you visit.
NATCHEZ, MISSISSIPPI
Longwood
The house that was never finished
Longwood is the largest octagonal house in America, and it has stood unfinished for more than 160 years. When the Civil War began in 1861, the Northern craftsmen raising it laid down their tools and went home; the family lived in the basement beneath a dome that was never completed. I first photographed Longwood in the fifth grade, on my grandmother's Kodak Instamatic. This October I finally went back β thirty-seven years later, with a little more camera. Some stories take their time.
LAUDERDALE COUNTY, MISSISSIPPI
Stuckey's Bridge
The lantern on the Chunky River
Every county has a bridge the locals warn you about, and in Lauderdale County it's the iron truss over the Chunky River that carries Stuckey's name. The legend goes back to the 1800s: a man named Stuckey β said to have ridden with the Dalton Gang and been left behind when they moved on β kept an inn on the riverbank. At night he'd walk out onto the bridge carrying a lantern, and travelers who saw the light took it for a welcome. Twenty or more of them never left. He buried them along the river, so the story goes, until the law caught up with him β and hanged him from the same bridge he'd used to lure them in.
The bridge standing now was rebuilt in 1901 and stands closed to traffic, but the story never closed with it. People still report a light moving on the water after dark, splashes beneath the span, the creak of a rope with no wind to move it. True or not, the Chunky runs dark under that bridge β and nobody who knows the story crosses it at night without looking for the lantern.
ENTERPRISE, MISSISSIPPI
Dunn's Falls
The waterfall a man built
The tallest waterfall in Mississippi wasn't made by the earth β it was made by an Irishman with work to do. John Dunn came to Lauderdale County around 1850 and, in 1854, cut a channel that turned the Chunky River over a ledge, dropping it sixty-five feet to power his mills. The falls ground corn and ran cotton. The Confederacy put the mill to work during the war, and a few years later the same falling water powered a workshop for a young hat maker named John B. Stetson.
The mill beside the falls today is an 1857 gristmill, moved here piece by piece from Georgia and rebuilt on the ground where Dunn's original stood. The falls never stopped. A hundred and seventy years after one man rerouted a river to make a living, the water is still falling β and people come from other states just to stand at the bottom of it.
MERIDIAN, MISSISSIPPI
Rose Hill Cemetery
The Queen rests here
In January 1915, Kelly Mitchell β Queen of the Gypsies in America β died giving birth near Coatopa, Alabama, camped with her people forty miles from Meridian. Her husband, King Emil, offered ten thousand dollars to any doctor who could save her. None could. Meridian was the nearest town with enough ice to keep her while the Romani bands crossed the country to mourn her, and so Meridian is where she stayed. Twelve days later, thousands filled Rose Hill Cemetery for her funeral β and by some accounts, a second service was held at midnight, for her people alone.
Rose Hill holds a hundred Confederate soldiers beneath one obelisk, its epitaph reading 'Awaiting the Resurrection' β but the grave the world comes to see is the Queen's. King Emil joined her in 1942, and Mitchells have rested there ever since. More than a century later, her grave is still never bare: beads, coins, fruit, bottles, trinkets β offerings left by people who travel from all over just to stand at her stone. Rumor said she was buried with gold, and grave robbers cracked her slab hunting for it. The real story needs no gold. A woman who belonged to the road was given a home by a town that wasn't hers β and people are still bringing her gifts.
MERIDIAN, MISSISSIPPI
McLemore Cemetery
The oldest ground in Meridian
Before Meridian was a city, it was Richard McLemore's land. The first permanent settler here set aside this hilltop in 1839, behind the Baptist church he'd built, and it remains the oldest surviving historic site in Meridian β a cast-iron fence around roughly a hundred graves. McLemore rests here himself, alongside victims of the 1878 yellow fever epidemic and the violence of the 1871 riot. Masons who nursed the fever-sick through that epidemic sleep here too, in numbers.
The last burial was in 1942. Since then the hill has been left mostly to itself β grass and weeds over crumbling stones, names weathering off the markers one winter at a time. A 1971 census could still identify ninety-six graves. Fewer can be read today. Meridian grew up around this place and then, mostly, forgot it β which is its own kind of story: the city's first ground, still holding the city's first dead.
JEFFERSON COUNTY, MISSISSIPPI
Rodney
The town the river left
In the 1850s Rodney was one of the busiest ports on the Mississippi β four thousand people, a rival to Natchez, close enough to the state capital question to taste it. What remains is a handful of buildings in the woods, two miles from the river that made it. The river moved. A sandbar pushed the channel west in the years after the Civil War, the steamboats stopped coming, the railroad passed it by, and in 1930 Rodney gave up its charter and became a ghost town.
The Presbyterian church still stands, brick and Federal-styled, built in 1832. Above its balcony windows there's a cannonball in the wall β a replica now, seated in the original scar. In September 1863 the reverend invited the crew of the Union gunboat Rattler to Sunday service; Confederate cavalry burst in and took them prisoner, and the Rattler answered by shelling its own men's church. Fire took most of the town in 1869. Floods came back for the rest. But the church is still there, holding its scar up to the trees β the last citizen of Rodney still standing at attention.
NATCHEZ, MISSISSIPPI
Natchez City Cemetery
A hundred acres of stories
Natchez has been burying its dead on this bluff since 1822 β a hundred acres of oaks and ironwork above the Mississippi. Drive Cemetery Road at night and you'll meet the Turning Angel. She watches over five young women, the youngest twelve, killed together in the Natchez Drug Company explosion of March 14, 1908. The company's owner bought the plot and raised the angel over them. She's stone, of course. But headlights sweep the curve of the road, her face catches the light β and she turns.
Deeper in lies Florence Irene Ford, dead of yellow fever in 1871 at ten years old. In life she was terrified of storms and ran to her mother when the thunder came. So her mother had her coffin made with a glass window at her head, and stairs built down into the grave, so she could climb down and sit with her daughter until the weather passed. A concrete wall covered the window in the 1950s, but the stairs are still there. People ask why this cemetery feels different. It's because the grief here didn't just carve stones. It built architecture.
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