[Granville-Hough] 15 Nov 2009 - Mize, at Threescore and Ten, Part 1

[Trustees for Granville W. Hough]

Date: Sun, 15 Nov 2009 07:34:14 -0800
From: Granville W Hough <gwhough at oakapple.net>
Subject: Mize, at Threescore and Ten, Part 1, 15 Nov 2009

In 1991 my friend, Harold Hopkins, 
learned about an ongoing project which had started as a history of Smith 
County, but which did not generate enough interest for the publishers.  
It was picked up by members of the Hopkins family and their close kin 
and became "Smith County - The Way It Was."  They wrote it to focus on 
Mize and its vicinity as that is where they had all lived, 
historically.  Harold immediately wrote his own views without seeing 
what others had written.  It is very interesting to me as Harold visited 
there more than I did and saw the post-war changes I missed.  I have 
made footnotes which one does not have to read.

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Mize, at Threescore and Ten, Part 1 
by Harold C. Hopkins

    I've looked at Mize many times -- during my first 18 years when I 
dwelled there and afterward, off and on, for another 52.  The only thing 
I can guarantee about these memoirs is that they were written from the 
advantages and disadvantages of  near seven decades. I was born at Mize 
in 1922 in my parents'  house, not a hospital, Dr. R.B. Boykin 
presiding. Perhaps it would've been better if I'd stayed  at home, but 
like most of those of my generation and times, I had to  look around.  
But I'll never stop looking backward as well.  In my opinion, people 
don't know where they're going if they don't know where they've been.
    Mize became a town about 1900, so it was 22 years old when I was 
born, but settlers had inhabited the area for almost a hundred years.  
My own family was first associated with the community called Fairmount, 
across Cohay Creek and about three miles north of Mize.  Fairmount at 
one time had a school, a church, a Masonic lodge, and a cemetery.  The 
church is still there, no more than a meeting house for folks who have 
relatives buried at the Fairmount Cemetery. There's a gigantic chicken 
broiler growing house a  hundred or so yards away and when the wind is 
coming from that direction it takes strong motivation to stick around 
long enough to pay your respects to departed kin.  When you live outside 
the state, you don't have much say-so about these instruments of 
progress.  More chicken, anybody?
    Fairmount and other communities were settled after the 1830 Treaty
of Dancing Rabbit Creek in which the Choctaws ceded a large tract of 
Mississippi that included Smith County to land-hungry settlers who came 
in small and large parties, with their belongings in wagons and their 
stock being led or driven, afloat or afoot, pushing out from the 
Carolinas, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama.  #1.
    As soon as the Indians had departed -- and sometimes before -- there 
were new families of settlers ready to homestead a land patent or bounty 
or claim, clear the forest, and sow corn or cotton in among the stumps 
and roots.  Some of the first trees felled became log cabins, barns, 
cribs, and other farm structures.  Rail fences and stock pens were put 
up as time permitted.  In the meantime, stock was turned loose to 
forage.  Sometimes disputes arose about stock ownership, especially 
hogs, that had been allowed to range free for several weeks or months. A 
farmer notched the ears of his free ranging hogs with his own mark, but 
marks could be altered by those who weren't pure in heart, and this 
practice sometimes led to bloodshed.  #2
    The Hopkins settlers were farmers, tanners, and chimney builders, 
and were neighbors with and intermarried with the Joneses, Eubanks, 
Ainsworths, Ellises, Glissons,  Wards, Walkers, Thompsons, and others in 
the Fairmount area.  #3 . These and other neighboring  families started 
a school to teach their children to read and write -- talents some of 
their parents never learned.  There were fewer slaves in Mize and Smith 
County.  Families who owned  a sizable number of slaves tended to settle 
in the Miississippi Delta regions, where the land was richer, but more 
manpower needed to clear off heavy growths of hardwoods before crops 
could be planted.  Slaves answered this need.  The cotton gin was 
invented.  The Civil War came and went.  Almost everybody planted 
cotton.  Cotton continued even to my day.  When  I was growing up there 
were at times two cotton gins in town.  In the autumn wagons and trucks  
loaded with cotton formed long lines at the gins.  Mize looked, and was, 
progressive in those days because more land was in cultivation and more 
people were involved in crop production.  Today, even if you grew a 
patch of cotton, you couldn't find a gin.  Much of the land lies fallow.
    In the twenties and thirties all the farmers had crops of corn and 
most had hogs and their own milk cows. Mize had two grist mills and 
others were located around the countryside, including a few 
water-powered mills.  You brought your shelled corn in bags and the 
miller had a little measuring box he used to take out enough of your 
corn to pay himself for his milling services.  What was left you 
received as finished cornmeal, still hot from the grindstones and almost 
burning through your shirt as you shouldered the sack to take home for 
making into cornbread, a staple for Smith County families.
    A few farmers had mills to reduce sugar cane and sorghum, and in the 
1930s a green-stalked cane that was called P.O.J. (Pride of Jamaica), to 
molasses.  Other farmers brought their cane to these mills to produce a 
supply of molasses for eating the rest of the year.  The stalks were fed 
into a steel rolling mill powered by a deadhead (unspirited) mule or 
horse willing to walk around in a circle all day long pulling the end of 
a long rod attached to the rolling mill.  The sap or juice  pressed out 
by the rollers ran by gravity downhill through a pipe or trough to  
brick furnaces under large  evaporating pans,  kept hot by loads of pine 
lighterwood knots.  The juice was boiled until it thickened into syrup 
and, just before it sugared off,  was spigoted into one-gallon or 
half-gallon cans, and sealed.
    The mill's owner paid himself by taking a percentage of the cans of 
finished molasses produced from each wagonload or truckload of cane 
brought to mill. Growing boys who visited this industrial enterprise 
knew that the cane juice was free to drink from a dipper hanging there 
on a hook for that purpose.  Boys spent more time than they should have 
in observing the workings of this industry.  Ball team coaches at school 
cautioned their young players against partaking deeply of this free 
juice, because it would cause you to run out of breath quickly the next 
day on the ballfield.  But when the syruping season started, not many 
were listening. #4.
    Considerable timbering also was still  going on when I was growing 
up. There was a special railroad that moved nothing but logs from the 
so-called Cohay Camp a dozen mills northwest of Mize to a spur on the 
Illinois Central Railroad at Mize, thence to the lumber mills at Laurel 
20 or so miles southeast of Mize.   Our house from the time I was about 
seven years old was within sight of this logtrain railroad, called the 
Eastman-Gardiner line, the name of the timber company.  I used to count 
the carloads of logs in a train when it puffed by under a  head of 
steam, but in those days there were so many trainloads of logs being 
shipped that it became boring.  If I were to see a trainload of such 
logs today I'd probably go into nostalgic shock.  Even then I was 
curious enough to wonder if the day would arrive when all the trees near 
the Cohay company settlement had been cut away. #5.. That time did come, 
and today the log railway no longer exists. Only a close look and prior 
knowledge can help one spot where the old railbed ran.

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GWH footnotes:
    #1.  The Choctaws gave up all their land holdings except for three 
Choctaw towns.  Two of the towns were in either Jones or Jasper county 
near the Clarke County Line.  I believe they were once called the 
Hiwanee towns.  The third town was near Philadelphia, and I believe that 
is where the Choctaws now have their Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians 
casinos, which helps them gain some self-respect.  The Choctaws had been 
the mother tribe for the Creeks and Chickasaws and all the Muscogeans, 
and they held the historic homeland.  They sadly made their way to 
Oklahoma after the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek. The present 
Mississippi band are descendants of those who never left.
    #2.  As, for example, "Old Hog Tom" Sullivan, whose reputation 
preceded him to Mississippi.  I think he got the nickname on the "Three 
Chop Way" when it passed through the Tombigee settlements in what is now 
Alabama.  Settlers moving along hogs just might lose them in the 
Tombigbee swamps.  Some of Hog Tom's older sons seemed to have verified 
their early traning by practicing in Simpson and Smith counties.
    #3  These were mostly Methodist families, and we only had Walker and 
Ainsworth relatives who had married into our Baptist families.  My 
grandfather Richardson called Methodists the "Methody People," because 
they had a method of getting to heaven without a dunking baptism.  We 
thought of Mize as mostly Methodist and Magee as mostly Baptist.
    #4.  Having a cane mill, we were well acquainted with the various 
varieties of sugar cane.  Before POJ, we had varieties which could be 
peeled and cut into bites for chewing.  It was very good.  POJ was 
introduced so we could burn the leaves and save time and labor with a 
machete.  However, burned POJ created much more crud to be skimmed off 
the cooking syrup.  We did not relish burned off leaves POJ syrup as we 
did the traditional ribbon cane..  We also knew the diarrhetic effect of 
cane juice.  Larry Hough recalled that the last time he ever wet his bed 
was after helping his father make molasses.
    #5.  The end came while we were still in grade school, before 1935.  
Cohay Camp simply disappeared, and we had school picnics along the old 
railbed into Mize.  That must have been the 5th or 6th grade..