[Granville-Hough] 16 Nov 2009 - Mize, at Threescore and Ten, Part 2

[Trustees for Granville W. Hough]

Date: Mon, 16 Nov 2009 07:31:54 -0800
From: Granville W Hough <gwhough at oakapple.net>
Subject: Mize, at Threescore and Ten, Part 2, 16 Nov 2009

The Best Times, Part 2
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(continued)
    The Gulf and Ship Island Railroad -- later bought by the Illinois 
Central RR -- routed through Mize about 1900  and took full advantage 
of the Hopkins family's offer of free land for a station and other 
inducements for bringing the railroad through the community.  The 
railroad put Mize on the map, so to speak, and enabled my grandfather 
James McDonell Hopkins and some of his brothers and sisters to lay out 
the village of Hopkinsville and sell lots for houses and stores.  A free 
lot was donated for a school.  Even when Mize reached its peak 
population of about 500, and boasted a dozen or so stores. a hotel, and 
other places of business, some of the streets my ancestors laid out were 
never used.  You could see those vacant lanes, fenced off and running 
through pastures, and so on. Adults would refer to these unused grassy 
or treed areas as "the street."  This made me snicker a bit  because I 
was a kid that knew the difference between a street and a place to dig 
earthworms for fishing.
    The town's name was changed to Mize early in the century. The 
railroad brought goods and passengers to Mize and the communities 
beyond.   In the 1930s, other Mize teen-agers and I earned pin  money by 
helping load railcars with local watermelons. I handled so many 
watermelons, I was able to guess -- within a pound or two -- the weight 
of a watermelon weighing 20 to 80 pounds.  It saved the shipper money to 
guess, correctly, which weight class a watermelon fell into without 
stopping to weigh it when it was thrown off a truck or wagon to you in 
the railcar doorway.  Upon hefting it,  you would sing out the weight 
and the marker would total it up. The farmer selling his produce had a 
right to have the melon put on the scales if he doubted the teen-ager's 
word as to weight. You  had to be good to keep your job.  A melon was 
thrown instead of handed to you, and you had to catch it without letting 
it drop.  You also  had to be alert and ready when a melon was tossed. 
Even a small one could knock you out of breath if it  hit you in the 
stomach unexpectedly, and a big one could nearly knock you down.  A 
sneaky pitch could take the wind out of a teen-ager who got too 
confident about his job. #6.
    There were some watermelon mutants call citrons that grew on the same
vines as the watermelons, but were doomed never to ripen in this life. 
It wasn't too difficult after a little experience to recognize these 
mutants by sight,  and it was a kind of a joke -- that startled either 
the farmer who offered it as a good melon or anyone else present -- to 
drop the melon, which would simply thud on the freight car floor, and 
remain unbroken. You couldn't bust a citron even it you threw it at the 
floor. I admit to the felonious thought of having wished I had a 
truckload of citrons to sell to certain city slickers I've met who think 
they know it all.
    Much of the farmland in the Mize area was what the economists call 
marginal; that is, it would produce a crop, but not a heavy one.  
Investment of time, labor, equipment, seed and fertilizer in marginal 
farming is subject to diminishing  returns.  In the 1930s and 1940s it 
became unprofitable to till such land.   #7.  These so-called one-horse 
farms began disappearing from the economic picture at Mize and 
elsewhere.  In parts of Smith and other counties, they have been 
replaced by a depressing,  melancholy operation called broiler farming, 
in which the land's owner is essentially in serfdom or peonage to large 
feed companies, which provide the baby chickens, the feed, the 
equipment, the medicine, and instructions to the farmer, whose main 
contribution  is to  keep the chickens fed and watered.
      These chickens never touch ground from the day they're hatched 
until they go into the frying pan.  I have disturbing thoughts about 
this kind of chicken production when I remember chasing a chicken -- 
fattened from eating table scraps, corn, grass seeds, crickets, 
grasshoppers, and worms -- around the yard for Sunday dinner. Now we 
have an adult person doing a grasshopper's work for a fee based on the 
company's estimates of its costs for hatching, for feed produced  
hundreds of miles away, for the services of the trucking industry, and 
for its own reasonable profit.  #8.
    Cattle farming has been found to be a reasonably successful economic 
operation in much of our area of Mississippi. #9.  Soy beans have 
replaced cotton on thousands of acres.  At Mize, there's still some 
timbering, largely pulpwood, from fast growing trees often harvested as 
saplings. some lucky farmers have a few oil wells.   Many farmers in 
southern Mississippi do  not own rights to oil or other minerals that 
may lie on their land.  In the 1890s and later the large timber 
interests of the north and northwest parts of the country, having 
depleted much of their timber reserves elsewhere, moved into southern 
Mississippi.  They bought thousands and thousands of acres of pine and 
hardwood forests at dirt cheap prices, and over a few decades stripped 
Mississippi of its virgin stands of longleaf yellow pines.  After 
scalping the land of these trees, they sold the land back to 
Mississippians.  #10
    But under Mississippi law, the land title and the mineral rights to 
it can be severed, so when these timber barons sold back the land, most 
of them retained the mineral rights in perpetuity for themselves. Today 
their heirs pay no taxes whatever for their ownership of such rights 
until oil or other minerals are actually produced.  These heirs and the 
oil interests that exploit these rights laid heavy siege to the state 
legislature to make sure Mississippi didn't  follow Louisiana in 
enacting legislation to prohibit the severance of mineral rights from 
land titles.  So the heirs of the large timber interests continue to 
enjoy these mineral rights and are  not obliged to provide any support 
or responsibility for the schools, public facilities,  people, or the 
governments of the communities involved. 
    It is difficult to find land in south Mississippi  where mineral 
rights have not been severed and snapped up long ago.  Even if you hold 
title to the land, you can't purchase the mineral rights from the 
owners, whose ownership is undivided, meaning that all the heirs or 
their trustees would have to vote as a group on the sale of mineral 
rights for a specific piece of property. And, as one trustee told me 
once, "They aren't about to sell, because it's their gravy."  And they 
have a lifetime mouthful of a silver spoon with which to eat it.  Would 
I live in Mississippi and pay taxes to support the rights of these 
drones?  I'd need to give it some serious thought.  (to be continued).

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

GWH Notes
    #6.  I was one of those on the trucks pitching the melons
    #7.  One of the major factors was the nature of our soil on the 
hilly land.  It was sandy loam with about 5 inches of topsoil, each inch 
requiring 1000 years to produce.  It eroded or gullied with the greatest 
of ease.  One night about 1940 we had 7 inches of rain in 12 hours.  We 
had just planted cotton and corn, and our land was all plowed.  We must 
have lost a half-inch of topsoil that night.  No terrace can hold that 
amount of water so fast.  We lost most of our cotton crop that year, and 
the gullying damage was permanent.  Our fields were soon down to the 
subsoil, which had no humus or inorganic matter and even more prone to 
erosion.  Row cropping, where you exposed the soil, was a losing battle.
    #8.  My brothers Clifford and Dueward Hough were subsidiaries of 
McCarty Enterprises, a Magee-based company run by the McCarty family.  
They were our distant cousins, but I do not know of any advantage that 
gave my brothers.
    #9  Cattle farming had its hazards, too.  My brother, Clifford 
Hough, lost a herd to a lightning strike when they had gathered under a 
lone tree in a thunderstorm.  My brother Dueward reasoned his cattle 
would not get hoof and mouth disease as they had no contact with other 
cattle.  He forgot about deer, birds, and other animals.  He lost a herd 
to that disease.
    #10.  At the depth of the Depression, Eastman-Gardner was selling 
land for $1.00 per acre, but few people had money to buy.  The price 
gradually went up, of course, but the monetary resources of the farmers 
were going down.  My anger and frustration about this situation caused 
me to spend considerable time in Management courses talking about the 
evils of absentee corporate ownership.  Students probably though I was 
crazy, but I still get angry when I think about it..