Thursday, September 27, 2012
Community | Obits | Editorial & Columnists | Society | Sports | Education | Classified Ads | Calendar of Events | Features | Newsbriefs | Legals | Archives | Subscriptions | New Photo Gallery
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Thursday, September 27, 2012 |
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Community | Obits | Editorial & Columnists | Society | Sports | Education | Classified Ads | Calendar of Events | Features | Newsbriefs | Legals | Archives | Subscriptions | New Photo Gallery |
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SocietyCity Personals Jacob McMinn pledges at Ole Miss; Andy Burleson pledges at Southern Happy Birthday wishes go out to Ella Marie Jackson, who celebrated over the weekend with her friends and family. Congratulations to Jacob McMinn, son of Jennifer and Jody McMinn! He pledged Pi Kappa Alpha at Ole Miss. Andy Burleson, son of Pam and Barry Burleson, pledged Sigma Alpha Epsilon last weekend at the University of Southern Mississippi. Congratulations to him, as well! Even though Al Ray has been away from Holly Springs for a while, I find it worth mentioning to those who still keep up with him that Anne Langdon, his daughter, pledged Chi Omega at Ole Miss. Those three young children have many wonderful attributes to offer the fraternity and sorority realm. Good luck in your future endeavors! Marshall Academy Patriots traveled to Indianola last Friday and absolutely took the Indianola Colonels down. It was touch and go the first half, leaving the field with a 13-6 lead. Second half, the Patriots came out ready to get down to business. At the end of the game, the final showed how hard they played - 28-6. A big conference win for the Patriots! This Friday night, the Patriots are back at home for the first time in three weeks. They will be hosting the Green Waves of North Delta. This is one of the biggest games, if not the biggest, of the entire season. This rivalry is going to be one you do not want to miss! Kick-off is at 7 p.m. Come out and show your support for the Patriots as they are getting closer and closer to post-season playoffs! Congratulations to the Marshall Academy softball team for advancing to the state tournament in Jackson Saturday. They beat Canton over the weekend to secure the berth. Good luck to the girls who have worked so hard this season to get to this point! Saturday night will be rocking with a Flashback ’70s dance and auction at the Oak Palace! Friends of MA are putting on this event and it is sure to be a blast! Put on your boogie shoes and head on down to dance the night away! There will be both live and silent auction items, a great assortment of raffle items, appetizers provided by some of the best cooks in the area and, of course, music! Tickets are $20 per person if purchased before Saturday and $25 at the door. It begins at 7 p.m. (To put your news in City Personals, please e-mail maryclayb@yahoo.com; mail to City Personals, The South Reporter, P.O. Box 278, Holly Springs, MS 38635 or call 662-252-4261. You may also e-mail your City Personal news to southreporter@dixie-net.com).
Carlena Lesure and Morris Chism IV will exchange vows October 6 Mildred Burgess and Wade Hightower are pleased and proud to announce the engagement and forthcoming marriage of their daughter, Carlena Deshawnta Lesure, to Morris Chism IV. Morris is the son of Morris III and Deloris Chism of Memphis, Tenn. The bride-elect is the granddaughter of Tom and Ellar Lesure and the late Will and Louise Hightower The prospective groom is the grandson of Josephine McDonald and the late Morris II and Sarah James Chism. The couple will exchange vows on Saturday, Oct. 6, 2012, at Highland Street Church of Christ in Cordova, Tenn., at 2:30 p.m. with a reception following at the church. The couple will honeymoon in Hawaii and reside in Olive Branch. Museuming County makes lots of changes in the past 176 years I marvel all the time at how beautiful Marshall County is. Each corner of the county is different from the other and, of course, Holly Springs is in the center of these gently rippling hills, some covered with trees, some covered with green grass. Mississippi has fewer rocks than any other state except Louisiana, which has none. We have sandstone, some in the form of geodes with different colors of clay inside. The only use of these was when the Chickasaws broke them and used the different colors of clay to paint their faces. One of the leading assets of early Mississippi for the settlers from Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia and Tennessee was that there were no rocks in the soil. All they had to do was clear the land of virgin timber which they could use for building. Another asset was the fabulous clay which was perfect for making bricks. The lodes of clay here are phenomenal. A clay pit, almost the size of the Grand Canyon, used by Warren Buffet and others to manufacture his clay products is in northeast Marshall County. All the big and some of the little mansions here were made of bricks. Each brick was signed by the maker. Their signatures are unreal: some are thumb prints some are two fingers, some three or four, or even the palm of the hand. These early settlers dug a pit, which became the cellar and saved the clay and made it into bricks. Literally, the houses rose from the soil on which they were sitting. Also in northeast Marshall County, we have the beginning of the Coldwater River and its tributaries. Where the convergence of the Big Coldwater River and the Little Coldwater River meet, there was once a Civil War fort, mostly gone now. Also in the north is Lamar, now in Benton County, but originally in Marshall County until it was divided during Reconstruction in 1870. The county was so big at first they started to name it “Empire County.” Then it was divided to help make two new counties, Benton and Tate. At Lamar there is a continental divide. On the east side, all water goes into the Tombigbee; on the west side all the water goes into the Mississippi. That’s where the beginning of the treacherous Wolf River is. It was named after a family named Wolf on whose farm it began. The Wolf River ends up at Memphis. It is very deep, very narrow, and very dangerous. It seems calm on the surface, but is full of whirlpools and undertows, but I can walk across it in old Marshall County. Even there, it has cut a million-year-old gorge with huge beech trees where the Northern soldiers camped. They carved their names, the date, and their companies on the trees. The carvings were right where the soldiers stood 150 years ago to carve them, as the tree grows inside up but the bark stays in one place. However, the ice storm of 1994 killed a lot of the big trees. This is the only place in Marshall County where those big trees grow. They aren’t native trees from here. Southeast Marshall County is also phenomenal. So is the Tallahatchie River which is all in Lafayette County and Marshall County is a few feet away. In 1812, a canal was built by the government to alleviate flooding. It begins in Union County and ends at the Tallahatchie River Bridge on Highway 7 South. The word Tallahatchie is Indian for “yellow river” as it’s full of mud. In south Marshall County our southland is absolutely full of creeks and springs; there is Spring Creek, Spring Lake, even Spring Hill Church which has a deep spring right beside it. Many mills were on these creeks. Someone could make a good living with a mill (the name Miller came from this occupation.) Nature arranged the hills of southeast Marshall County to look like ocean waves, a high ridge and a valley, over and over again. I was about nine years old when I went to visit Great Aunt Sue, whom I thought was ancient. Late in life she married old Mr. Newsom and for the rest of her life called him “Mr. Newsom.” I asked her why she called her husband “Mr.” and she replied, “I don’t know him well enough to call him anything else.” That day I visited I remember the cistern that caught rainwater from the roof. Aunt Sue used this on her skin as it had no iron in it. The antebellum house was on the Waterford Mountain Road and faced west and is gone now. I sat in the swing overlooking the western panoramic waves of hills thinking I could see to California. At Cornersville in the southeast corner was a longitude from which that surveyor of long ago measured off the county. At one point a person could stand in three counties; Marshall, Lafayette and Union (which used to be Tippah), if he had three feet. The Mississippi wetlands are phenomenal and not usually seen by many people. It is unique to Mississippi and there is no place like it in the whole world. I wish it could be set aside as a national park as it is so special. Fred Whaley told me about it. It’s like one of the world’s wonders. On the west side of Marshall County is Rocky Mountain, the highest point between New Orleans and Chicago. This is marked on the map with an elevation of 625 above sea level. Also in Marshall County there are two Indian mounds used for burials for the Indians where they piled dirt on top of dirt to make two tall hills, one at Laws Hills, elevation 590 feet, the other on the Waterford Mountain Road. However, someone has plowed the top of the one in Waterford and lowered it considerably and it is no longer outstanding and it’s elevation is only 375 feet today. There used to be a thousand-acre lake in western Marshall County that was very shallow and full of huge cypress trees. The Indians used it for recreation and food, as it was full of fish. In 1913, the lake was drained and all the trees were cut down and made into lumber and shipped to Chicago, Ill., to be used as piers in Lake Michigan. The pigeons at that time were so numerous that they blackened the sky. All the pigeons were killed, put into barrels and sent to Chicago as delicacies to eat, eliminating all the pigeons; not a one was left. North Marshall County is fantastic, too. The hills have kind of tapered off. At first the Tennessee line on the north border of the county was further up than it is today and Memphis was in Mississippi. It is said the surveyor was drunk when he measured it the first time so it was re-measured and lowered, cutting off a thin slice of North Mississippi. When this happened, Dr. Bailey’s house had the kitchen in Tennessee and the dining room in Mississippi. From Mt. Pleasant General Vaughn’s plantation was half in Mississippi and half in Tennessee. He raised regiments from both states for the War. The “War Between the States” covered Marshall County with 64,000 Northern troops of General Grant’s army stationed in Holly Springs. Marshall County was like the conduit between the north and the south as, we didn’t have a river but we had a railroad connecting the north with the south. We were a war zone. Consequently, we had 62 little skirmishes in the county, more than anywhere else in Mississippi. Absolutely everything changes, (except Jesus) and Marshall County has really changed in our 176 years. The county was created in 1836 and named after the chief justice of the land, John Marshall. Many states founded at this time period have a county named after him. This July was recorded as the driest July ever. More tornadoes happened this July than ever before. |
    
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Holly Springs, MS 38635
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