Category: Stories of the Delta
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Pedro is Waiting
In a tucked away corner of Maple Hill Cemetery lies the Moore family plot. You can tell the Moores were wealthy by the way their markers look. A number of people are buried here, surrounding a large memorial with the names of at least six members of the family engraved on the sides. Toward the…
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Murder of Aubrey Prince
For the last thirty years my parents and I have had to take care of Dowd Cemetery out from Maud in Tunica County. One of those tombstones at Dowd belongs to a young man named Aubrey Prince. Like the few memorials left in that cemetery after it was destroyed in the eighties, it is broken.…
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Southland College
Southland College was a beacon of light in the Arkansas Delta for thousands of African American families. It was the first institution of higher learning for African Americans west of the Mississippi River. On April 8, 1864, Calvin and Alida Clark exited a southbound steamer at Helena. They had been asked by the Indiana Freedmen’s…
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The Hustlerettes and the Lula Hotel
Straub, Virginia Merrifield. Phillips County Historical Quarterly. Volume 19, Number 3 & 4. June and September 1981. Published by The Phillips County Historical Society. Helena, Arkansas. This story is taken directly from an article in the Phillips County Historical Quarterly that appeared in 1981. In a series of articles for the Helena-West Helena Twin City Tribune,…
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Bloody Affair at Lula
Frontier towns in America were rough and tumble places after the Civil War. Names like Tombstone, Abilene and Deadwood bring out images of gunfights and saloons. Well we had a number of these rough and tumble places in Mississippi too. As the 19th century came to an end civilization began to take hold in most…
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Cotton Bale Medicine Company Advertisement
Up front, I had never heard of this poster before a friend sent it to me because he knew I worked in Helena. That got me interested and I started doing a little research into the document. “Eight Cotton Bale Remedies, Crowned with Merit and Success.” The actual poster is a 2 page set which…
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A Short History of the Lula Baptist Church
Growing up in the Lula Baptist Church during the 70s and 80s was an amazing time. There were activities for kids of all ages and a positive feeling for the future and the present shined over everyone. There were both youth and adult groups and Sunday school was always full of smiling and happy members.…
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Boyd Family of Union and Tuscaloosa Counties (Boyd family of Union County, MS)
Family trees bring out coincidences that are interesting and can lead to some confusion. Last names can be tricky. People can have the same last names, but come from different families. Thats true of the Boyd name for me. I have Boyds on both sides of my family. Mom’s Boyd branch of the family came…
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Gone But Not Forgotten
Years ago when I was a teenager, my Father and I went out to a little cemetery he knew about. I had driven by the place many times and never noticed it was there. Like so many cemeteries in the Delta, these souls had been laid to rest near a church. As people moved, the…
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Green River Deaden
Between Six Mile Lake and the Tunica/Quitman County line lies an area known as Green River Deaden. Not many people live here today. In fact, there are only a few houses left, but this region was home to hundreds of people at one time. There was a church and a store, but today that’s all…
My Delta World 