Waynesboro—Laurel—Brookhaven—Washington. US 84.
Waynesboro to Washington, 191.3 m.
Mississippi Central R.R. parallels route between Prentiss and Silver Creek, and between Brookhaven and Washington.
Graveled roadbed two lanes wide.
Accommodations in cities and towns.
US 84 in Mississippi runs through a backwoods country in the eastern part of the State and through the Natchez plantation area in the west. A great part of the country is rural; the highway skirts Sullivan’s Hollow, brushes briefly the Pearl River communities and dairying and truck farms near Brookhaven.
WAYNESBORO, 0 m. (191 alt., 1,120 pop.) (see Tour 4), is at the junctions with US 45 (see Tour 4), with which US 84 is united to the Alabama Line, and State 63 (see Tour 15).
At 2.1 m. US 84 crosses the Chickasawhay River and meets the junction with a graveled road that borders the river.
Right on this road to the unexplored PITTS CAVE, 1 m., on the Pitts farm. The cave, with its entrance in the side of a hill, is a limestone formation. A number of stories are associated with the place. An Indian, said to have lost his dog in the cave, went in after it and was never seen again. Some say his skull was found years later. The dog, it is asserted, came out at another entrance with its body stripped clean of hair by the limestone gases. Another story has it that a Confederate detachment, pursued by the enemy, took refuge in the cave. The most enthralling story, however, is that of the exploration made by Capt. L. S. Pitts, father of the present owner, who many years ago decided to investigate the cave, using twine and candles in a Tom Sawyer manner. After four candles had been burned, Pitts was at the end of his twine and gave up his search for the end of the cave. He had traveled, he estimated, three miles. When he emerged, his eyes and face were swollen from the gas. Pitts believed the cave went under Chickasawhay River, for at a certain point in his trip he could hear running water above him. The river is about a mile in a direct line from the mouth of the cave.
US 84, between the Chickasawhay River and the Bogue Homo Creek, runs through a sparsely settled, marginal pineland and farm country. On both sides are log cabins with mud-and-stick chimneys, storm pits cut into red clay banks, and ancient, one-mule-power cane presses.
At 24.6 m. the highway crosses Bogue Homo (Ind., red creek) Creek.
At 25.6 m. is the junction with a graveled road.
Right on this road to the first fork; L. here to a crossroads where is the SITE OF THE RUSHTON POTTERY KILN, 1.9 m., an unusual concern for such a remote place as the “Free State of Jones.” The Rushton brothers, who were potters by profession, came here from Staffordshire, England, and erected a kiln many years before the War between the States. The owner, B. J. Rushton, gained a reputation for himself throughout this section, fashioning pieces that ranged from five gallon urns to saltcellars.
At the period of his greatest prosperity, between 1858 and the outbreak of the war, Rushton owned 20 slaves, one of whom was such a fine potter that Rushton is said to have refused $1,500 for him. Rushton mixed his clay with a log sweep pulled by a mule. He fired his ware without a temperature gauge, using peep holes in the top of the kiln to help him judge the color of the ware and the extent of processing. For fuel he used dried split pine. The ware was finished with a glaze called hickory pulp, made by a soupy mixture of clay and hickory ashes.
On Feb. 2, 1864, Rushton was shot through the door of his cabin by Babe White, a member of the Newt Knight band (see Tour 8). For a time Rushton’s 12 children operated the pottery, but they abandoned it after a new process of salt glazing, which they introduced, proved unsuccessful. The site today is well strewn with pieces of broken ware, and a mound of crumbling brick marks the place where the furnace stood.
The highway here passes through the undulating, prairie-like country that appears at intervals along the northeastern edge of the Piney Woods.
At 30.5 m. US 84 crosses the Tallahala (Ind., smooth rock) Creek.
US 84 follows Cook’s Ave., which becomes 15th St., to 2nd Ave.
LAUREL, 31.5 m. (243 alt., 18,017 pop.) (see LAUREL).
Points of Interest. Masonite Plant, art museum, canning plant, and others.
Here are the junctions with US 11 (see Tour 8) and State 15 (see Tour 12).
The route continues on 2nd Ave.; L. on 7th St.; R. on 8th Ave.; R. on 6th St.; L. on 13th Ave.; R. on 5th St. (US 84).
At 34.1 m. is the LAUREL COUNTRY CLUB AND GOLF COURSE (open to visitors by card) with a long 18-hole golf course.
At 35.2 m. US 84 crosses Tallahoma (Ind., red rock) Creek. Tallahoma and Tallahala Creeks are Laurel’s legendary protection against tornadoes, the Indian tradition being that wind storms will seldom cross a running stream. The ridges around the plain and between the two creeks are apparent as US 84 climbs slowly W. of the Tallahoma. The timber stands on distant ridges are blue and hazy.
At 40.4 m. is the junction with a graveled ridge road.
1. Left on this road to BUFFALO HILL, 3.7 m., a beautiful low ridge between Tallahoma and Big Creeks commanding Ellisville and the valleys of the Tallahala and Tallahoma (R) some 200 feet below. This ridge at intervals has outcroppings of salt that fashioned its history. Buffalo traveling the ridges of the Mississippi Valley made the salt lick a favored gathering place, meeting here in mating season. The sandy red clay soil began to wash, and torrential spring rains gradually cut deep ravines across the ridges, following the buffalo paths. Now more than half of the vast swelling hills are cut into deep gullies of fantastic shape and color. A legend tells of a terrible drouth that drove the buffalo to new feeding grounds shortly after the first white explorers came to Mississippi’s Indian country. The buffalo are gone, but the gullies they started grow deeper year by year.
2. Right on this road is SOSO, 1.6 m., a farm community dying swiftly as Laurel drains its vitality. The MOSS PLANTATION, 5 m. (L), is an unusually fine hill-country cotton plantation. In the creeks and runs that border the road are cold, spring-fed, swimming holes, into which naked rural children dive from the branches of trees.
At 43.4 m. (L) is a good example of the dog-trot log cabin, the original type of house in this hill country.
At 44.1 m. the highway crosses Big Creek. On the bank of the creek is the BIG CREEK CHURCH, belonging to the oldest “Hard-shell” Baptist congregation in Jones Co., organized more than a century ago. The present white frame building, built about 1887, is a simple structure set in a quiet lowland with a churchyard across the highway. In April and May the creek banks at the rear of the church are a bower of laurel blossoms, and all summer long the flowers bloom in the churchyard. In the Lauren Rogers Library and Museum of Art in Laurel is a PAINTING OF THE CHURCH by Paul King, A.N.A.
Between Big Creek and Hebron US 84 traverses poor cotton and corn fields separated by woodland patches of scrub oak and surrounded by crooked, split-rail fences.
HEBRON, 48.5 m., was once the home of Capt. Newt Knight of the Jones County Free Staters (see Tour 8).
At 50.8 m. the highway crosses the Leaf River on Reddoch’s Bridge. The shell of the old bridge remains (L). The crossing is possibly a century and a half old.
At Reddoch’s bridge (L) is the entrance to DESERTER’S END LAKE, a horseshoe lake where Free-Stater Newt Knight and his band often hid out to evade the pursuing Confederate cavalry. The peninsula within the curve of the horseshoe was a strategic position at which to meet attacking forces.
At 54.6 m. (L) is a country church and churchyard with graves covered by small wooden sheds. The church has gingerbread trimmings, reminiscent of the architecture of the 1890’s and incongruous with the simplicity of its lines.
COVERED GRAVES IN A COUNTRY CHURCHYARD
The highway in its tortuous descent of the ridge occasionally passes good stands of timber.
COLLINS, 62.7 m. (274 alt., 935 pop.) (see Tour 7, Sec. b), is at the junctions with US 49 (see Tour 7, Sec. b), and State 35 (see Tour 16).
WILLIAMSBURG, 67 m., was the seat of Covington Co. when Covington included a large part of what is now Jefferson Davis Co. In the old county Williamsburg was at the geographical center and, before the railroad passed it by, was a political center of considerable influence. It is now unpainted and almost uninhabited. Cane presses, log cabins with separate kitchens, mud chimneys, and paling fences remain.
MOUNT CARMEL, 78.5 m. (218 pop.), marked by a half-dozen unpainted houses and unoccupied stores, was in the 1880’s a thriving crossroads town grown rich from the farming country around it. When the railroad was carried through E. of the town, the white merchants’ dwellings in their faded splendor were taken over by Negroes.
At 81.5 m. (R) on the hill is MOUNT ZION CHURCH, typical of the hundreds scattered through this section of the State, where church service is one of the few diversions in the weekly routine.
PRENTISS, 85.4 m. (655 pop.), a stubbornly independent farm town, is the seat of Jefferson Davis Co.—the natives call it Jeff Davis. Like a majority of Mississippi county seats it is dwarfed by its courthouse. The farmers of Jeff Davis Co. were the first in the State to vote against beer after its legalization in 1933. The residents of Prentiss, with this same standard of morality, still refuse to sanction round dancing in the community house constructed with WPA assistance.
Perhaps the most recent of the many stories of Prentiss concerns what is locally called the Battle of Mississippi Run. The BANK OF BLOUNT-VILLE in the center of the town was held up in 1935 by Raymond Hamilton, a public enemy who had found a hide-out from G-men in the Jeff Davis Co. hills. When the bank sounded its alarm the citizens took out their squirrel guns and “Long Toms” and went after the fleeing bandit. All day through the dust, he was followed by an ever-increasing group of man-hunters, who were whooping at him from a respectful distance. The climax was reached when Raymond turned, waited for the vigilantes to catch up, and then held up and disarmed them. Two of the sturdy citizens were taken as hostages and stuffed in the rumble seat of the car in which Raymond made his get-away. He abandoned the car and hostages at Memphis, Tenn.
Left from Prentiss on State 42 to the PRENTISS NORMAL AND INDUSTRIAL INSTITUTE, 1 m., a privately controlled but semi-public training school for Negroes, non-sectarian and coeducational, with a self-perpetuating board of trustees. The curriculum, of four-year high school grade, aims particularly at teacher training. Approximately 400 students come from rural homes of 25 south Mississippi counties, and most of them work for their board and tuition. The property on which the school is situated was once a plantation, and the ante-bellum big house is now used as an office building. It is said that several grandchildren of slaves who belonged to the plantation have graduated from the school. The Prentiss Jubilee Singers have been used to publicize the work of the institution for more than 20 years, a third of the operating expenses usually being met from funds raised by the traveling singers; they have toured every section of the United States.
Between Prentiss and Silver Creek the highway passes through a remote section with small cotton farms, where farmers live almost independent of outside influences.
SILVER CREEK, 95 m. (263 alt., 341 pop.), has wooden sheds over the gravestones in its graveyards.
At 101.6 m. the planter-style house (L) is indicative of the influence of the Pearl River Valley.
At 101.8 m. the road parallels the river (L), passing through a cypress swamp of considerable charm, and crosses Pearl River at 102.7 m. The view (L) from the bridge is one of the finest in the valley.
MONTICELLO, 102.8 m. (200 alt., 606 pop.), is a good example of a Mississippi inland river town. Fifty miles down the Pearl River from Jackson, it was a port for river steamers running to and from New Orleans as late as 1904. The town was founded in 1798, the year Mississippi Territory was created, and was made the seat of Lawrence Co. in 1815. From that time until 1880 it prospered, reaching its greatest population, 2,500, in the latter year. Just before the War between the States, the Illinois Central R.R. was built through Brookhaven 22 miles W. of Pearl River; this has been a drain on Monticello’s business.
During its period of prosperity, however, the town furnished the State two Governors, Charles Lynch (1836-38) and Hiram Runnels (1833-35). Hiram Runnels was the son of Harmon Runnels, founder of Monticello and in 1817 a member of Mississippi’s first Constitutional Convention. Harmon Runnels was described by Col. J. F. H. Claiborne, Mississippi historian, as a “Hard-shell” Baptist who had been a hard-fighting captain from Georgia in the Continental Army, decidedly a pugilist in temperament, and ready to flare up at anyone who slurred his religion, his politics, or his friend, Gen. Elisha Clark. He ruled the Pearl River country as long as he lived and died an octogenarian at Monticello. His son Hiram took office as Governor in 1833, then was defeated by Lynch in 1835.
In the second campaign as he toured the State Runnels was heckled by Franklin Plummer. As Colonel Claiborne, candidate for Lieutenant Governor on the Runnels ticket, described the scene, Plummer, the representative of the United States Bank interests, “having no principle, was able to keep provokingly cool and entertaining to the crowd,” while poor Hiram “found his indignation and resentment beyond expression in parliamentary language.” But the Runnells party were no mean hecklers themselves. Their press dubbed Lynch as the “alias Van Buren, alias Jackson, alias anti-Jackson, alias anything candidate.” Both Lynch and Runnels were vocal in opposition to the bank and to Calhoun’s nullification theory, their stand on these two national issues representing well the anti-capitalist and anti-planter views of their Pearl River Valley constituents.
Monticello was selected the State capital in the 1820’s, but 24 hours later the legislature changed its mind. In the courthouse, which has been rebuilt three times, silver-tongued Seargent S. Prentiss, lawyer and orator, received his license to practice law in 1829. Several of the inscriptions in Monticello’s two cemeteries, written in Hebrew and Greek, show the learning of some of Monticello’s early citizens.
At 103.4 m. (R) is the junction with a graveled road that borders the river. This cool, shaded drive through a hardwood forest suggests well the break the Pearl Valley makes in the typical culture of the Piney Woods.
Between Monticello and Brookhaven, US 84, passing isolated churches and churchyards, runs through the westernmost tracts of the Piney Woods from which the truck-farming belt has developed. The truck fields begin to appear near the OAK HILL FARMS, 118.8 m. (L), whose champion bulls have taken ribbons at many Southern stock shows.
BROOKHAVEN, 127 m. (500 alt., 5,288 pop.), has practically outlived its ante-bellum character and with its dairying interests has become a lively modern town. Until 1851, when it was the first northern terminus of the New Orleans & Great Southern R.R., Brookhaven was little more than a straggling group of plantations centered about the crossroads store of Samuel Jayne, who had settled here in 1818. With the advent of the railroad, it slowly took shape as a village of wealthy merchants who ensconced their families in great white-columned homes to live leisurely but formal social lives. Until 1907 it was a place where ladies never made calls without hats and gloves, where the blinds were drawn for afternoon siestas, where streets were unpaved and shadowy with the arching branches of live oak trees, and where the daily arrival of the train and the mail were events to be anticipated. In that year, however, Brookhaven broke with its staid past to pioneer in a new activity in the State. The creamery established here was the first in Mississippi. Today the town is the hub of southern Mississippi’s dairying country, supplying a great part of the milk products shipped to New Orleans. It has a well-knit business section and asphalt-paved streets; and sons and daughters have left outmoded rambling Colonial-style homes to follow every architectural fad in house building. Only burgeoning oaks and here and there a landmark are left as relics of the former easy village life.
The HARDY HOME (private), S. end of Jackson St., is a good example of the type of house wealthy citizens built prior to and just after the War between the States. Constructed of red brick, the house follows the Greek Revival style, with imposing fluted columns simulating the stone ones of the Natchez district. The interior has ornamental plastering and fine old furnishings. Built by Capt. J. C. Hardy, it has for five generations been in possession of that family.
The W. C. F. BROOKS HOME (private), near the courthouse (R) on Cherokee St., antedates the Hardy home by several years. It is a one-story frame structure built in 1858 in the plantation tradition. Its spread of rooms in long side ells, and the low sweeping lines of its roof give it an attractive informality.
WHITWORTH COLLEGE, facing South Jackson St., was built in 1858 as a successor to Elizabeth Academy. Today it is a Methodist junior college for girls that manages to retain a mellowed dignity in spite of modern-minded undergraduates. During the war the school dormitories were used as a hospital for wounded Confederate soldiers.
Here is the junction with US 51 (see Tour 5, Sec. b).
Between Brookhaven and Meadville the highway passes through a country of pines and bluff hills. The pines are small but fairly thick. The cuts through which the highway runs show the yellow gravel-and-sand mixed clay that makes the section valuable for truck farming. The gradually increasing undergrowth in the woodland patches indicates the approach to the loess area. Split-rail fences border the road, and here are a number of oak-shaded churches and several small frame school buildings for Negroes. The rain-washed fields show the section’s great need for erosion control.
At 143.3 m. US 84 crosses the boundary of the HOMOCHITTO NATIONAL FOREST, first of the national forests to be established in Mississippi. This one is irregularly shaped and lies for the most part along the Homochitto River basin. It is used to demonstrate the control of soil erosion that has formed the large bars in the river. The forests have been cut over at least once and most of the area has been severely burned. The old cotton fields, abandoned at the outbreak of the War between the States, contain fine stands of second-growth loblolly pines.
Within the forest US 84 crosses the Homochitto (Ind., big red) River, 147.6 m., a clear stream meandering through great white sandbars.
The mill towns in the forest, QUENTIN, 149.5 m (200 pop.), EDDICETON, 152.4 m. (375 pop.), and BUDE, 156.7 m. (1,378 pop.), are lively but stereotyped with their clustered cut-to-a-pattern houses.
At MEADVILLE, 161.1 m. (341 pop.), is the FRANKLIN COUNTY COURTHOUSE. The county is named for Benjamin Franklin. On a well-chosen knoll at the west end of town, squarely blocking the highway, which serves as the main street, is the Meadville MASONIC HALL. In outline at a distance it is imposing, but closer inspection shows it to be plain. The town has no churches, religious services being held in the Masonic Hall by various denominations. The bell mounted on a scaffold at the side of the hall is rung before Sunday services.
Meadville is the home of Congressman Dan R. McGehee.
US 84 between Meadville and Washington shows well the fertility of loess. Vines running to the tops of tall pines are akin to those of the Natchez district. The great difference between these woods and the woods on the savannahs N. of the Coast is the undergrowth. Whereas the latter are park-like, these in the loess hills are jungles of tangled vines and shrubs. Through them the highway rides the comb of a ridge affording charming vistas of the National Forest.
At 171.2 m. US 84 crosses the western boundary of the De Soto National Forest.
At 186.6 m. is the junction with a graveled road.
Left on this road 0.1 m. to old US 84; left on this road to entrance to TRAVELER’S REST, 1 m. (private), the plantation home of Col. James Hoggatt. Hoggatt received his land grant from the Spanish authorities at Natchez in 1788 and built Traveler’s Rest in 1797. At one time the Hoggatt holdings were perhaps the largest in Adams Co. Traveler’s Rest is in reality two buildings joined by an immense open passage, with pointed arches at each end. It is an elaboration of the double-pen principle usually seen in log cabins rather than in planter’s homes. Across the front and rear stretch galleries 84 feet long, supported by square colonnettes. Seven generations of Hoggatts have occupied this home.
WASHINGTON, 191.3 m. (200 pop.) (see Tour 3, Sec. b), is at the junction (R) with US 61 (see Tour 3, Sec. b), with which the route unites between this point and Natchez.