Events circa 1905-1913.
Written May 1993 – January 1994.
During the 1907-1911 period, the Methodist Home Mission Society employed my father
and mother as “Home Missionaries” in the backwoods of Mississippi. Those
woods were predominantly primeval pines — huge, tall trees with most of the growth
up high.
The forest floor was a thick carpet of pine needles, upon which we could run and skate a short distance with our heel-less sandals. This was the same sport that Ohio children enjoyed on icy walks.
Enough of this verdure was cleared to contain Bennett Academy and the small village of Clarkson. The academy, which was my parents’ responsibility for four years, was housed in one central building with six classrooms and offices for the administration.
It was flanked on the left by the two-story boys’ dormitory, and on the right, at a discreet distance, by a two-story girls’ dormitory. A small one-room country schoolhouse complete with two privies was behind the administration building.
One teacher taught all eight grades to about 20 or thirty children in this school. The teacher, a Miss Slone from Ohio, was a kind and patient faculty member. She taught me to read and write, but I can’t remember the process she used to do it.
Clarkson had one long, winding street. It led to the small whistle-stop town of Mathiston, eight miles away. We had to drive through the pine woods and a swamp in a wagon drawn by mules to get there. A corduroy road crossed this swamp — made with logs placed side by side in the mud. The ride was bumpy, but it kept one from sinking in the mire.
A dozen or so small wooden houses built up on stilts were along the village street, many with open hallways from front to back. Underneath the houses there was always a pack of hungry-looking hound dogs — hunting dogs that were guardians to keep all predators away. Behind the houses they often had a shack to house their animals — a cow, a couple of mules and a few chickens. The houses had no lawns — just clean swept red clay. The red clay was swept clean around the fifty-foot long wooden structure in the center of town that served as a church. The cemetery across the road from it was a bleak expanse of oblong red clay mounds marked with wooden markers. There was not a blade of grass or flower planting in sight.
The small local store, which sold moonshine and tobacco in all its popular forms, was next to the church. Chewing tobacco and snuff were the most in demand. Ham, fatback, cornmeal, molasses, and golden yams comprised its inventory. No wonder my father built a rival store selling our kind of food.
The people of Clarkson were isolated, ignorant, prejudiced, and poor. They cherished their isolation from any stranger whose ways and beliefs differed from theirs. Strangers were suspect, and Negroes were not tolerated. In the four years we were there I don’t remember seeing a single black person. They would have been stoned had they appeared. They were so racist, illiterate, and without culture, as we define it.
Their houses were so primitive and sparsely furnished. They had no indoor plumbing or electricity. It was the talk and wonder of the village when my father installed one functional bathroom and electric lights in the girls’ dormitory.
I enjoyed playing with the village children who attended Bennett Academy, and often went home with them after school to play for an hour or so.
One mother always handed out cold baked yams after school. I must have been hungry because they tasted so good. My family thinks it queer that I still like them. Another mother let us eat all the raw goobers we wanted from her storeroom.
We were not couch-bound before a TV set. Instead, we had all outdoors to explore, roam in, and have fun. However, two terrors existed in the backs of our minds in this unfenced world.
Herds of hookin’ cows, scrub cattle with long, curved, pointed horns, wandered free in the woods. They were particularly vicious in calving season, and we were warned to run home whenever we saw them.
Lean, ill-fed hunting dogs sometimes went rabid and escaped to wander across the countryside. They were a real danger to small beasts and children, as their bite was almost certain death to the victim.
Both of these terrors caused nightmares, in which I would run so fast from the mad dogs or hookin’ cows that my feet would leave the ground and tread in the air. At that point, I would wake up in a cold sweat because it had been so real.
In spite of these terrors, we had a delightful time outdoors gathering flowers in the spring, our favorite being the dogtooth violet. Two royal purple petals on top with four lavender petals below and a dot of gold in the center made a beautiful flower smaller than a pansy, but larger than a violet.
There was one Dr. Greer in town. When I broke my left elbow falling off his rail fence, my mother took me to him for help. He said, “She’ll be OK. Take her home and give her a good dose of calomel.” Calomel was used to treat the malaria that was so prevalent there and seemed to be the only cure they knew.
Mother omitted that treatment, but she and my Aunt Grace did set the arm as best they could. They bound it up and made me wear it in a sling for six weeks. After that, they diligently treated the immobility of the joint with massage and had me carry a pail full of sand until my arm’s full range of motion was restored.
Then there was the time I needed a dentist. My father had to drive a wagon hitched to two mules to Mathiston over eight miles of corduroy road to reach the only dentist for miles around. Every bump accentuated the pain in my jaw.
The dentist took one look at my painful gum boil, got out his razor, and sharpened it by whetting it on the stiff, plush upholstery of an old revolving piano stool. He then said, “Open up!”, and lanced the boil with one deft move.
My pain was instantly relieved. Germs? Neither the dentist nor I had ever seen one, so why worry about them? My recovery was again miraculous.
Clarkson funeral customs were quite different. There were no undertakers, funeral parlors, florists, hearses, or any of the amenities my folks were used to having when caring for their dead. Each family took care of its deceased, placing them in a homemade pine box lined with quilts. They placed this casket on the floor of a wagon surrounded by small homemade chairs in which the next of kin would sit to go to the funeral.
The mules would then drag this grieving load to the Baptist Church — a shack with a podium and crude benches. The family sat by the open casket, up near the podium.
They wailed all through the scripture reading. This was important to do because neighbors would always ask, “Did the family carry on?” If they didn’t cry and “carry on” at the funeral, they didn’t love the deceased.
At the end of the service the procession would carry the corpse across the road to the freshly dug grave in the barren cemetery. They dolefully sang – “When the Role is Called up Yonder, when the Role is Called up Yonder I’ll be there…” while they marched single file to the cemetery.
We lived for four years in Meridian, Mississippi after leaving Clarkson. Meridian was a city of twentieth-century amenities, sans mad dogs and hookin’ cows.
My father taught in Meridian at a military academy owned by a man named Beeson. Not far away from this military school was a matching military school for girls, owned by Beeson’s brother. This second school was for young ladies from the best Southern families and the daughters of each school’s faculty.
Life in that school was intolerable. Mr. Beeson had two sons, Ralph, 8, and Dwight, 6, who needed a school. He created a school for them by placing them in the same classes I was in. The two boys were tyrants in class and on the playground, and our teacher catered to them because their father paid her salary.
She was poor in teaching the elementary courses a young child should have. She mostly taught Southern culture and Southern ways, and I was shunned as a Yankee. This prompted my parents to send me to live with my grandparents in Wadsworth, Ohio, where the schools were good, strict, and businesslike.
This is why I had my fifth and seventh grades in Wadsworth, Ohio, while my parents spent the school year in the deep South.
During our first year at Meridian we lived in a typical Mississippi bungalow–square, one story, pointed roof, and front verandah flush with the sidewalk. The back of the house was up on stilts because of the slope upon which the house was built.
This access under the back part of the house made a nice, shady place for us to play. We had a store under there. Our product, mud pies baked out in the sun and stored in the rafters under the house to dry, was much fun for my ten-year-old girlfriends and me. Another diversion was to sit on the fence across the road and watch the cadets of the military academy drill.
It was in this house that a “blessed event” occurred on April 4th, 1911. My brother Karl1 Alfred was born! This day was the highlight of our days down south. Aunt Sarah Swartz, grandpa Himmelright’s sister, had come all the way from Ohio to take care of mother and child.
Father was so excited at having a son that he decided immediately that the house was too small–even his hat became too tight. We moved to a beautiful two-story home surrounded by a garden of nut trees, magnolias, fig trees, roses, and gardenias. It had a beautiful little playhouse under a shady pecan tree that was built just for a little girl. I loved to play there!
I was delighted to have a new baby to care for. Mother, who had taught school all her adult life, decided to become domestic and stay at home to keep house, cook, and care for her two children herself. She assumed this new role with difficulty, but she assumed it well.
Freddie, my nine-year-old girlfriend, and I liked running across the fields to the pine grove where Meridian’s Holy Rollers held their camp meeting. They preached with such vigor and volume that they could be heard all over, so we were attracted to see what was going on.
The Holy Rollers would call for their listeners to come up to the podium for healing and would start by saying “Praise the Lord” faster and faster until they went off into a babble. This was called the gift of tongues. The Holy Rollers were so sure they were speaking the Lord’s message that they occasionally sent a convert as a missionary to a foreign country, being sure he was prepared to speak to the people there.
Another time the minister caught our attention was when he preached about baptism. He said very forcefully that if you were not immersed in running water as Jesus was, you would certainly go to hell.
The next Sunday afternoon they planned a baptism service in the creek down beyond the woods, urging everyone who had not been baptized in running water to join them. Freddie and I talked it over and decided we would not take the risk of going to hell. We would be there.
When I went home that evening, I told my father and mother what Freddie and I planned to do. My father took me on his knee and told me that I had already been baptized by a Catholic priest and a Methodist bishop and that he felt that was sufficient. Besides that, the creek was full of poisonous cottonmouth moccasins.
Fifty Years Later
One late winter day in the mid-sixties2, when the earth in Ohio had not yet come to life, we had the urge to greet springtime before it reached us. We would go south through Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi to visit The Calloway Gardens, the Little White House, Bellingrath Gardens, and lastly spend the week before Easter in Natchez on the Mississippi River.
The Garden Club of Natchez was putting on its annual open house and garden tour, plus a Spring Gala at their Community Center on Easter afternoon. The urge to escape Winter took over, and we were on our way.
The gardens were ablaze with azaleas and camellias. The dogwood, redbud, and other blooming trees were still beautiful. The tender green of the still dormant leaves was so beautiful against the dark green of the native pines.
We had to cross Mississippi after seeing the gardens and had the bright idea of going through the Clarkson and Mathiston area on our way to Natchez. We could see the places I had talked about through the years!
I had heard that the Methodists had sold Bennett Academy to the Baptists, and knew they had wanted to move the school to Mathiston, but I knew no more.
We immediately sensed a change when we entered the village of Clarkson. The houses were better and more prosperous looking. I was indeed astonished that the whole topography of the area had changed.
The store and church were not where they used to be and all the buildings of Bennett Academy had vanished. In their place was a large, one-story public elementary school building that was temporarily deserted for the holiday.
Gone were my majestic pine trees that covered the country when I was little. In their place were deciduous trees, oaks, sweet gum, black gum, and some maples that were almost ready to harvest. The pines were obliterated for their lumber, turpentine, rosins, and other products.
Gone was Bennett Academy and the Clarkson I knew, so we went on to Mathiston where I looked up “Woods Junior College” — the new version of the old Bennett Academy.
We heard that Bennett Academy had been carefully torn down and every stick and stone of it hauled to Mathiston and reconstructed there as Wood’s Junior College. This was vividly proven to me later when we went to Mathiston.
There was no one about when we arrived in Mathiston so I couldn’t find out what I wanted to know. As I walked up the Wood’s Junior College Administration Building steps, I was greeted with “Why Mary, you have no business here!”
I replied, “Oh yes I do. I was here before you were.” It was Jimmy Morgan, a girlfriend and classmate from Berea College in Kentucky. She and her husband and classmate Charles Morgan, who was president of Wood’s Junior College, had been in Mathiston for some time.
Jimmy and Charles had known my parents well in the years after we moved to Berea, where together they had been active in the Union Church. The Morgans had even bought some bedroom furniture from my parents, which I enjoyed using again when we stayed all night with them.
The Morgans had no idea we had lived and worked in the Mathiston region, and didn’t know that my parents had been Bennett Academy’s last administrators. But then, I didn’t know the Morgans were in Mathiston either.
We toured the girls’ dormitory before leaving and saw bronze plaques on the doors that recorded their donors. One read, “The Methodist Home Missionary Society of Mansfield, Ohio furnished this room.” Another said, “The Ladies Aid Society of Ashland, Ohio furnished this room.” So it went down the hall.
From Mathiston we said goodbye to Jimmy and Charles and went on to Natchez. We had no time or desire to look up our old haunts in Meridian, which had been coming back to civilization for us after having lived in Clarkson.
While in Natchez we lived a delightful week in the old South in an atmosphere that has really “Gone with the Wind” — but that thrilling week is another story…
Time marches on, and in the process heals many wounds to the environment and to the souls of men whose achievements have been shattered and forgotten. Such were my feelings after my visit to that part of Mississippi.
Mary W. Dial
1The approach of World War I caused the spelling to change to the less German appearing Carl. ed
2This trip possibly happened in the 1950s. ed.
Transcribed July 1993 - March 1994
Posted May 14, 1994 at 00:24.
Revised Jan 23, 2023 at 20:23. EDT.
Retrieved May 31, 2026 at 00:19.
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