Town of Bruce, Mississippi Executive Proclamation
Town of Bruce, Mississippi Charter
Infinite Gold
King Edward 2005
Belhaven’s Haunted Beanery
There’s a beanery in Belhaven Heights. Over a lifespan of 80 plus years it has been host to wayfarers, a Rebel…and a ghost.
Before I get ahead of myself, let me explain what a beanery is. The term dates from the year 1887 in England and was loosely thought of as an inn for travelers on their way to further destinations. It had nothing to do with coffee or tea or a vegetable. In America, a beanery became the name of a hotel for railroad men; a place to rest, to eat, to sport or reflect on their way to further destinations. The term beanery came to mean “let’s go eat” and breakfast, the primary meal for freshly awakened sojourners, was served by “beanery queens” – waitresses, some left over from the night before. Our beanery stands at the curved intersection of Spengler and Madison Streets in Belhaven Heights. Built in 1927 as a two-story craftsman residence, it resembles a fugitive image from the Old West with a downstairs porch and upper balcony that could have welcomed the likes of Jesse James or Doc Holladay.
According to present owner Steve Colston who has done his own research on the building, the structure was purchased from Mrs. Louise Middleton by J.W. Miller in 1930 and was called Miller’s Café,
with Humphries Barbershop on the east corner. It was subsequently renamed Millers Place and remained so for a number of years. According to Colston, back in the day you could get an upstairs bed for $.35 a night and for an additional ten cents, access to a shower, probably a good investment. Plate lunches were available downstairs where the special was a large bowl of soup for a quarter. Over the years the building passed through several hands and purposes. Mrs. Louis Miller ran the restaurant in the 1940’s, while J.W. took care of upstairs. From Herbert Stair’s restaurant in 1950, it became the GM & O Beanery Restaurant in 1954, Hugh Tullos’ restaurant a year later and the Spengler Street Café through the early 1960’s. It was vacant for several years before housing the Central Systems Company in 1973. It was bought by Colston in 1976, where it served as the Steve Colston Photography Studio for 35 years.
Throughout its early history it was a rough and tumble home for hundreds of men en route to thousands of destinations along countless twists of fate. Then came the railroad. The Gulf, Mobile and Ohio (GM&O) Railroad, as later generations remember it,
began operations in 1940 when the Southern Railroad sold its Mobile & Ohio bonds to the Gulf, Mobile and Northern Railroad. The GM&O then combined with the GM&N to form the GM&O. As a point of interest, Colonel William Clark Falkner of Ripley, grandfather of Nobel Prize winner and famous Mississippi author William Cuthbert Faulkner, was instrumental in the formation of the Southern Railway in northeast Mississippi in the 1870’s. The modern day GM&O had two points of origin, New Orleans and Mobile, with headquarters in the latter. The New Orleans line passed through Jackson and connected with the Mobile tracks at Meridian. This main line then extended north through St. Louis and the Ohio valley. The GM&O passenger train which passed through Jackson was named The Rebel and a sister train, The Hummingbird, connected Memphis, Birmingham and Montgomery. The Rebel may still be remembered by older Jacksonians as the sleek red and silver locomotive which pulled into the depot under the old Pearl Street bridge west of Jefferson Street daily before heading north past the fairgrounds and by our old beanery toward the heartland of the nation. The GM&O has one great distinction among railroad lore. It developed the first diesel locomotives in the country and I can still remember their whistle and roar from my open bedroom window on Manship Street when I was in my single digits.
The GM&O tracks on the eastern edge of Jackson carried far more traffic than the Rebel. While not as exciting as the dashing passenger train, the freights conveyed endless dry goods, oil and lumber into Middle America. Rebel travelers detrained at their depot and repaired to meals at the Elite, Bon-Ton, Belmont and Mayflower Restaurants and lodged in the Heidelburg and Edwards Hotels. Soldiers were returning from the Great War (WW I) and small town girls took the train to the capitol city to visit the bustling shops that once thrived on Capitol Street. Engineers and workers on the freight lines ate nearer their work stations and many times lodged at the beanery at 1032 Spengler. This was where the railway shops were and a roundhouse just east of their night’s rest.
My own familiarity with the beanery was as a teenager in the middle 1950’s. My friend Jimmy and I would walk down the hill from his house on Madison Street and visit the place for a hamburger. My latest visit to the building, courtesy of Mr. Colston, revealed a downstairs room much smaller than I remembered when I was 15. The old bar was still there with only five stools remaining and the corners where the jukebox and pinball machines rang out their allure were filled with the dust and debris of half a century. Jimmy and I were underage – even for a hamburger in an establishment that sold beer, but the proprietor would let us stay awhile and watch the railroad men play the pinball machines for money and listen to Hank and Lefty on the jukebox before there was a Willie. It was a thrill for us to be in what we thought of as a nightclub of worldly men, not knowing or at that point in our lives caring that their temporary diversions and long-term loneliness were for only a time assuaged by a can of beer and a little steel ball. We were not allowed to go upstairs. This was probably a good thing. But had we sneaked up those stairs in the rear instead of just going home to our folks, we might have seen the ghost.
No old haunt worth its copper plumbing would be complete without a ghost. Of course our beanery has one and not only that – it’s been documented. In a feature article in The Times-Picayune’s “Dixie Magazine” dated October 28, 1978, Maybelle Gorringe interviewed owner Steve Colston who confirmed the specter.
“One day my grandmother and I were working inside the building to complete its restoration and be able to move in. I was in one room and my grandmother was working in another nearby. Suddenly, she heard footsteps overhead and called to me. I went upstairs but didn’t see anybody, but I heard the footsteps too.” Colston set about talking with neighbors about the structure. Upon authority of several informants he heard two men had met mysterious deaths there. One was literally stomped to death over a woman in an upstairs bedroom, the other fatally shot on the stairs leading up to the second floor. A former owner’s statements found echoes in the memories of other anonymous testaments. One said, “I know a fella who helped a girl escape from there after World War II, when it was a house of prostitution,” but was afraid to talk of the man who got shot on the stairs because “relatives of the man are still living and I’m afraid to talk about it.” Colston said some railroaders told him stories of police raids. One said he saw police back a paddy wagon up to the door and load it full of people arrested for gambling. On another occasion police chased a man from one of the upstairs rooms to the nearby rail yard and shot up three train cars getting him out. Other tenants told stories of curtains moving in an upstairs window, someone walking from the sink to the bed, and on another occasion a man and his business partner were inside the building when “the wind began to blow. Suddenly we heard the damndest noise you’ve ever heard. We rushed up the stairs and looked into each room. We found the ceiling had fallen in one of them.”
Colston said that several of his employees witnessed unexplained activities over the years. One said he was in an upstairs room with the door closed when the doorknob suddenly began to turn. He thought another employee was upstairs and called out. A woman who was downstairs said
she heard him and thought he must be talking to himself since no one else was in the building. Colston said light fixtures have fallen from the ceiling without apparent reason. He has also heard a mysteriously tinkling bell, and although getting used to footsteps and turning doorknobs, he still was reluctant to go upstairs at night. “Any time I do, I feel the hairs stand up on my arm and chills run down my back.” Other strange events have taken place in the old beanery over the years. The 1979 flood covered the first floor of the structure and when workmen replaced the floors they discovered human bones and a boot. Could this have been the unfortunate soul killed on the stairs? Was there a ghost? Is there one now? Could it be that being a professional photographer Colston could have a specter silhouetted on a lost negative in a forgotten drawer of his old roll-top desk? Were there footsteps in the hallway? Did the bell ring? Did the doorknob turn and voices mumble in the night? Or was it just the wind?
Trains have always held a fascinating place in our nation. From the Union Pacific to the super trains in the west and the northeast, these serpentine and silver ships of the land have fired the imagination with adventure, danger and riches. Jimmie Rodgers and Arlo Guthrie sang of them, Thomas Wolfe wrote of them and pioneers rode them to new lands and opportunities from coast to coast. Along their tracks are the lives of the millions they connect. In depots and freight yards across our country are the chapters of our history. There were thousands of beaneries and millions of patrons and countless memories woven along the rails. And so our beanery stands today and after 88 years still remembers when it was Miller’s Place or home to Louise Middleton or when Steve Colston was young and making pictures of a vibrant Jackson. Now it silently looks over the rear of a barbecue restaurant, swaths of Johnson grass and a warehouse grown over by weeds. Its architecture is unchanged but gone are its bedrooms, its beer and fries, its colorful patrons and the old jukebox of country favorites. The roundhouse has passed into history, the tireless railroad workers and vagrants to their thousand destinations and the girls and roustabouts from the second floor to the denouement of their lives. Not even the tracks remain or the water tank or the steam.
Yet, if you look closely at an upstairs window on the east side of the balcony, you might imagine Maybelle’s ghost, watching and listening itself for the thunder and rumble of the Rebel, the clash of switching boxcars and that mournful whistle of an early diesel locomotive heading north toward the river trestle, pulling behind it a time forever gone, where only an empty beanery and a ghost remain.
Bill Harvey
February 2012, revised March 2015
Copyright Bill Harvey, 2015
Walker’s Restaurant 1980
Washington’s Walnut
Calhoun County in the 1830s: Settling the Wilderness
This is another section (Chapter 3) of Mississippi governor and Calhoun County native David H. Murphree’s History of Calhoun County, which was published circa 1948. What’s riveting about this portion is an eye-witness account of the settlement of the land, descriptions now-vanished plants and animals, the people and provisions. Notes providing additional historical and genealogical information by James M. Young.
I wish that I might have had an opportunity to see the virgin country the greeted the eye of the first settlers in what is now Calhoun County, Mississippi. It must have been a beautiful sight. It was my privilege to have had a first-hand description of this land from Miss Elizabeth Enochs, who was the sister of my mother’s mother, and who came with a caravan from Tennessee as a girl of eighteen, not so awfully long after the Indians left. She said that it had been the practice of the Indians for many years to burn the woods each fall, so that there were few thickets; that therefore standing on one hilltop, you could see a man or a deer moving through the trees even to the next one; that the trees were all large in size and tall in the extreme. 
She described the time of their arrival in May, when the wild flowers were blooming everywhere in profusion and indescribably beautiful. “Switch” cane or short growth cane was to be found in all the valleys, and through these beautiful woods moved herds of deer, sometimes thirty or forty in a drove. Wild turkeys were everywhere and without much fear of man. Wild pigeons (passenger pigeons) according to “Aunt Bet” came at times in such immense droves as to absolutely darken the skies; when they alighted on the trees they did so in such great numbers that the branches often broke.
There was “bear sign” where these huge animals had reached high up on the tree trunks and scratched, sharpening their claws everywhere, and at night the wild scream of a panther sounding like 
a woman in keen distress was often heard, making the children hug the camp fires and their mothers shudder with uneasy fear. Small game like rabbits, quail, and squirrels were so numerous as to attract no attention whatever when sighted and so easily killed that the hunters refused to shoot at one single target, but waited to get two or more of the animals together so that they might be killed with one shot. The streams were all crystal-clear and huge fish could be easily seen drifting with the current or darting swiftly to seize some luckless worm or insect that had fallen in the water.
It was to such country that there came in the early 1830s a stream of pioneer men and women in covered mule or ox wagons, driving their cattle and other livestock, with a plow or so swung behind. These covered wagons were usually called “tarheel” wagons because the axles were wooden and must have every few miles an application of tar or some other kind of lubricant to keep them rolling. 
My father said you could hear them squeaking for miles. Bows of splits made from heart white oak were bent over the wagon high enough that a person could stand up inside and over the bows was stretched tightly a piece of tenting or “wagon sheet” treated to repel the rain. There was an opening at the front end and also the back, and inside these immigrants carried everything that they could store which they felt would be necessary in the wild new land. Of course, the “Tennessee Rifle” was a very necessary piece of equipment and most of them had in addition a long single barrel shotgun with which to keep the pot filled with the small game above mentioned.
Naturally here and there one of them brought with him his old time violin or “fiddle” as it was better known, and these instruments were from time to time brought into use at the “log rollings”, “corn shuckings” and “house raisings” which were so popular in the early days. 
Too, in addition to the well-worn copy of the family Bible, which each and every family brought and on whose pages were inscribed the names, date of birth, etc., of all the children as well as the dates of death of members of the family, a number of these folks brought with them copies of a peculiar book. It was the old “Sacred Harp” song book. These books were different in makeup from all other books, in that they were very wide in page width and narrow in page depth. The notes were differently shaped from other music notes. Singing in the Sacred Harp goes back for hundreds of years and even today many people who learned to love this music as they grew up feel that it is the most beautiful of all music.
An old fashioned black wash pot, made of iron, standing on three short legs, was also part of the necessary equipment and this pot was used for many, many things. In it the clothes were boiled for the weekly wash. Soap was made in this pot; hominy was also made in it; 
likewise water for the Saturday night scrub was oftentimes heated in it. When the hogs were killed in the fall, the lard was cooked in this pot. There were few kitchen utensils. An old fashioned oven with a heavy lid was one. In it bread was often baked and potatoes too. It too had many uses. Beds were usually homemade after the immigrants arrived. The “corded” bedstead was most popular. It was a four poster bed, with rope or cords stretched back and forth across from one side to the other and from one end to the other. On this was laid the “corn shuck” mattress, which as its name implies, was made from the husks or shucks from corn. For real luxury a feather bed made from feathers or down plucked from live geese and stuffed into a “tick” was laid on top of the shuck mattress. People slept on feather beds in even hottest summer time. The women brought a few seeds of flowers, sometimes if the season was right, a shrub itself, to reset in their new homes in the wild new country. The old spinning wheel was another piece of standard equipment for without it there would have been no thread for knitting socks and stocking, and likewise no thread to be use on the old hand looms for weaving for the clothes for the entire family.
Notes: It is positive that almost all of the first inhabitants of what is now Calhoun County came down the famous old Natchez Trace. (1) They came from the Tennessee-Carolina country. Crossing the Tennessee River near Corinth, then on down the Natchez Trace to Old Houlka where the Indian Agency was formerly located, spreading out over the section to the west, along the various creeks which ran into the Schoona and the Yalobusha rivers. In the beginning, these settlers did not open and clear the river bottom lands very much. They cleared the rolling hill sides and the creek bottoms. Their dwellings were built on high hills, often just where a spring bubbled out from under the hill below.
Of course, a number of these first inhabitants came from Alabama and Georgia. These came by way of Aberdeen, Columbus etc. However, the great majority of these first settlers came as stated above from Tennessee and the Carolinas. Governor Murphree says “it is positive” 
that almost all of the first inhabitants came down the Natchez Trace. However (probably after someone proofread what he had written and provided him comments to the contrary), he retracted that a bit and said “Of course, a number of these first inhabitants came from Alabama and Georgia…” In fact, many of the first settlers of Calhoun County came from Alabama into north Mississippi. The Murphree family itself came over from Alabama. Martin Murphree, DHM’s grandfather and David Murphree, DHM’s great grandfather, came from Alabama. As the Murphree Genealogical Association data states: “David Murphree remained in Tennessee about a decade. By 1818, however, records show that he was a Justice of the Peace in Blount County, Alabama and the same in Walker County in 1820. The David Murphree family is enumerated in the 1830 census of Walker County where the families of his sons Roland J., Ransom, and Samuel M. Murphree are also enumerated along with his son-in-law William Barton.
The Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek in 1830 opened Choctaw Nation land in north Mississippi and the Treaty of Pontotoc a few years later opened Chickasaw Nation land as well. 
For the next few years after the treaties, there was a great migration into the Yalobusha-Chickasaw area of north Mississippi. About 1835-1836 David Murphree and his wife Jemima, who were then about ages 72 and 63 gathered up their children, in-laws, and grandchildren, and with their neighbors — the Brashers, Collums, Lantrips, and Browns — made their way into Mississippi in a wagon train pulled by oxen, some 30 wagons all told. They apparently crossed the Tombigbee River at Cotton Gin Port near Amory and made their way into Chickasaw County and to the Indian agency at Old Houlka. From there, they spread out over the area to the west along the various creeks and rivers. Many of the early settlements were located on or near abandoned Indian villages.
According to one of David’s descendants, the late Jackson MS attorney Dale H. McKibben, the family first landed at Airmount, which was in the Choctaw Cession. When Chickasaw Cession lands became available about three years later, 
some of the families moved eastward from previous Choctaw lands to Chickasaw lands. Two of David’s sons’ families, Martin and Ransom Murphree, split off from the rest and moved eastward into the Rocky Mount/Oldtown area which was in Chickasaw County at first but became Calhoun County when that county was formed. Airmount and Rocky Mount are about 15 miles apart as the crow flies. Airmount is on the north side of the river which has come to be known as the “Skuna”, while Rocky Mount is on the south side. Travel between the two was arduous, especially during the winter time or in flood times, and remained so until relatively recent times. “ JMY
Doe’s Eat Place
Greenwood: A Resting Place Downtown
There’s a green place in the heart of Jackson where roses bloom and a Summer House rests beneath the city skyline, a place to have a quiet lunch, a leisurely walk and a chance to recharge batteries during another day at the office. You won’t be disturbed; those many around you there lived their lives to fruition years ago. You will be in a place to contemplate your own life and expectations in Greenwood.
Greenwood Cemetery is Jackson’s largest green space; much larger than downtown’s Smith Park or old Battlefield Park in south Jackson. It is bounded on the east by West Street, on the north by Davis, the west by Lamar and the south by George. Each of these streets has its own story and each was part of the early city. They have changed in nature but not their boundaries or how it all came about when the city was founded. Those interred within these grassy perimeters of Greenwood were influential in the early city and responsible for building it to maturity. They are not ghosts, they are history, and you will have a chance to know them better. Let’s begin.
The cemetery itself, part of a federal land grant which also established the City of Jackson as the official site of the Capitol of Mississippi on November 21, 1821, was formally designated by an act of the State Legislature effective January 1, 1823. The original six acres were known simply as the “graveyard” and later as the “City Cemetery”. Some referred to it as the “burying ground”. An early map (1822) showed the area west of what is now West Street as vacant land indicating that originally the cemetery, while in Jackson’s original plan, was not yet officially within the city limits. The cemetery is shown on an 1845 Jackson map as the Grave Yard, encompassing 11.8 acres. The future extension to its present size is shown in squares 6N, 9.64 acres and 7N, 9.77 acres on this map. Its formal designation as Greenwood Cemetery was adopted in 1899, and it was listed on the National Register of Historical Places as a Mississippi landmark in 1984.
Greenwood Cemetery contains the graves of seven Mississippi governors, 14 Jackson mayors, six Confederate generals, six state Supreme Court justices and 27 clergymen. It is the final resting place for over 100 unknown Confederate soldiers whose lined markers may be seen easily from the West Street side. According to Greenwood Cemetery Association board member Peter Miazza, “Jackson pioneer Logan Power said there are altogether about 600 Confederate soldiers buried in the Confederate graveyard. We have names of about 500 of them, but do not know exactly where each is buried.”
“There were no sections for any group,” Cecile Wardlaw, executive director of the cemetery Association says. “Many old cemeteries were divided into sections by race or religion. Greenwood never was. Catholic, Protestant, or atheist, black or white; everybody just got buried. ‘Born in Ireland’ appears on many of the oldest stones.”
Time well spent with Mrs. Wardlaw and Mr. Miazza in May 2013, provided a wealth of information on the early days and development of the cemetery. “There are 330 unmarked graves at the original south end of the cemetery,” Mrs. Wardlaw related, “with the estimated number of all graves today being 5,000.” The oldest known surviving marker with a date is Governor Abram Marshall Scott who died June 12, 1833. There are an estimated 2,200 monuments posted on the Find A Grave website and Jacksonian Linda Robertson is in the process of doing a monument survey.
Mrs. Wardlaw told of how the roses came to be inn Greenwood.. “Local horticulturalist Felder Rushing donated the roses you see along the paths which he obtained from the Antique Rose Emporium in Texas. He did some work for that establishment and instead of getting a fee, he came back with a truck and trailer load of roses. He did that for two or three years and master gardeners helped him plant them. He will not tell us the names of the cuttings but only to say ‘they are there for people to enjoy’”.
The city owns the cemetery, but much of the maintenance is done by the Greenwood Cemetery Association which also raises funds to repair and perform landscaping work. Volunteers in this organization have provided more than 600 hours of service since the beginning of 2013. They have been aided by local Boy Scouts, AmeriCorps and the Phi Theta Kappa honorary fraternity at Mississippi College. Boy Scout Troop No. 1 (St. James and St. Andrews Episcopal Churches), performed volunteer work at the cemetery during the spring. The Brookhaven Monument Company is the primary source of stone repairs. The old section (south end) of the cemetery was not plotted since the “burial ground” was not officially a part of the city when first put to use. As the cemetery expanded northward, surveyors had difficulty putting in roads since bodies were buried haphazardly rather than in organized rows.
A number of Jackson’s first families have been interred in Greenwood Cemetery. Marion Dunbar, first pastor of Mt. Helm Baptist Church, is there. It was named Helm because Thomas Helm contributed the lot for the church to be built and also gave the church some money to help with construction. According to its website, Mt. Helm, Jackson’s oldest African American church, began in 1835, with several enslaved African Americans who worshiped in the basement of the First Baptist Church. It became a separate body in 1867, the year the 13th Amendment was ratified. A modern version of the church structure may be seen today at 300 E. Church Street near the west side of the cemetery.
Other Jacksonians of note include Millsaps College founders Col. William Nugent, Bishop Charles Betts Galloway, and Dr. William Belton Murrah, who served as the college’s first president; Dr. Lewis Fitzhugh, first president of Belhaven University and father-in-law of Dr. Murrah; founders of the Baptist Hospital, Harley R. Shands, M.D., and John Farrar Hunter, M.D., and Rev. John Hunter, pastor of First Presbyterian Church (1858).
Monuments are plentiful for many early Jackson families including the Yergers, Spenglers, Greens, Poindexters, Lemons, Virdens, Henrys, Miazzas and, of course Miss Eudora Welty.
In addition to Miss Welty (d.2001), other Belhaven residents buried in Greenwood Cemetery include Henry Muller Addkison, local hardware dealer (d.1974), Lawrence Saunders (more on him later), R.H. Henry, owner and publisher of the Daily Clarion and Clarion-Ledger (d.1891), and James H. Boyd (d.1882). Boyd, the owner of what is now The Oaks home on North Jefferson Street, was a former mayor of the city and his home was the site of the conception of Mississippi’s first “Decoration Day”, which became known nationally as Memorial Day.
Monuments range from barely noticeable to imposing. In the circle by the cemetery’s Summer House, is the monument of Rev. Amos Cleaver, an Episcopal priest, who died in October 1853 from yellow fever. Five years after his death, some women took up money for this monument. The exact location of his grave is unknown so his marker was placed where it is today. The widow Cleaver had a girl’s school in a frame building where St. Andrews Episcopal Church stands today at S. West and E. Capitol Streets. In 1854, she sold the school to the state for its first school for the deaf. There is also the “Weeping Lady” (Sarah Ann and George Lemon plot), the Hilzheim lot framing structure, which looks like a church, and the “Angel Tombstone” in the Poindexter lot.
Perhaps the most interesting monuments have stories associated with their namesakes. What’s in a name? We shall soon see.
The Saunders Stone
Lawrence Saunders was a professor at the deaf school which was then across the street from his mother’s house near Barksdale and North State Streets. On Christmas night in 1895, he dressed as Mrs. Santa Claus to entertain the students. Saunders was on his way to the school and stopped by his mother’s home to show her his costume but the front door was locked. He let himself in through the back gallery. The only person home was his nephew who awoke to discover a strange presence. He shouted “Stop or I’ll shoot.” Unfortunately, Lawrence, being deaf, did not hear the warning and was killed by his own kinsman. It is never good when you shoot Santa Claus.
The Little Dog Tombstone
An unnamed small girl lived in Jackson during the mid-1800’s. Her family moved from the capitol city to Oxford where the child died. She was buried in the Simms plot which may be seen north of the summer house to the right of the circle. It is said her small grief-stricken dog would not leave her grave and died at its foot a short time later. His likeness remains to guard his mistress through the portals of eternity – faithful to the end.
The Good Samaritan Monument
Dr. Samuel Cartwright was well known for his work and writings to control the great Yellow Fever and cholera epidemics. During the Civil War, he was charged with getting rid of dysentery in the Confederate military camps, but he contracted dysentery himself and died in 1863. The carving of the “Good Samaritan” on his tombstone attests to his sacrifice and may be seen on his marker today.
My Dog Skip
A movie scene, filmed in Greenwood Cemetery, was based on Willie Morris’ 2000 novel My Dog Skip, and represented the witches’ tomb in the Yazoo City Cemetery. It depicted one of the characters going out among the tombstone to sit down and drink booze. Also, a replica of the Helm mausoleum was constructed for the movie in which the bootleggers stored their moonshine. There is no written record, however, of these spirits raising other spirits or sharing their company for the evening.
Lorian Hemingway’s Ghosts
The granddaughter of novelist Ernest Hemingway came to Jackson in 1999 to write an article on the 1966 Candlestick Park tornado. While here she participated in a ghost tour in Greenwood Cemetery, which was conducted and scripted by Jo Barksdale, much to the delight of a number of children.
The Tallest Monument
The stateliest monument in the cemetery looks eastward toward the sunrise. It is said its tenant was fabulously wealthy, controlling more cotton land than anyone outside the country of Egypt. He died in New Orleans in an area made famous by Josh White’s folk ballad “The House of the Rising Sun”. No one knows exactly to what extent the sun rose on that occasion, but it does make for fascinating speculation. Following his death his wife donated $5,000 to the church. Perhaps a wise investment.
Early Jackson family descendent Peter Miazza says “If you want to take a short tour to visually observe evidence of the history of Jackson and the leading citizens of the State of Mississippi, there is no better place to learn than Greenwood Cemetery.”
They are all here, diverse in their lifetime but equal in the eyes of God. Within the 22 acres of monuments and memories lie those who preceded this day, and share its common ground. There are the wealthy and the pauper, the slave and his master, the business owner and his clerk, the patriarch and the child. There are the physicians, the barristers, the judges, the politicians, the writers and artists, the entrepreneurs and the indigents. There are the prominent with their success and their secrets. There are the unnamed and the unknown. There are the wretched and the rascals and the Good Samarian and the faithful dog. There is Everyman. As Albert Einstein once said “Before God we are equally wise and equally foolish.”
As you walk the paths of Greenwood Cemetery, contemplate the rose shaded spirits around you. Feel their presence. You, like them, are part of our city’s heritage and its destiny. While our own lives are but a flash of light in the darkness of creation- a short string, the deeds of those who sleep around us endure forever. It is one final reminder that beauty is at our fingertips and that we are not alone.
Bill & Nan Harvey: June 2013; revised January 2015
Copyright © Bill and Nan Harvey
Sources and suggestions for more information:
Most of the material in this article was obtained from an interview with Greenwood Cemetery Association Executive Director Cecile Wardlaw and board member Peter Miazza on May 9, 2013. Other sources include:
1) Greenwood Cemetery brochure
2) Wikipedia Encyclopedia
3) Walt Grayson’s Look around Mississippi (WLBT-TV, 4/24/12; 12/26/12)
4) Jackson, A Special Place by Carroll Brinson (1977) P. 49 (map)
5) Mt. Helm Baptist Church website
Interested readers might also wish to consult:
* www.greenwoodcemeteryjackson.org
* Find-A-Grave website
* The Old Cemeteries of Hinds County (1811-1988) by Mary Collins Landin