Tag: Tunica County
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Story of a Delta Merchant Family
My family came to Lula around 1940 and started a farm on Flea Harbor Road. The Mississippi Delta offered only a few pathways to having a better life in those days. You either farmed or became a merchant. My Grandfather, James “Jimmie” Dean farmed and my Grandmother, Ialeen Martin Dean opened a small grocery store.…
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Tunica Museum
The Tunica Museum is dedicated to the history of Tunica County. The area that would become Tunica was opened up to settlement after the Treaty of Pontotoc Creek in 1832. The Chickasaw relinquished their lands east of the Mississippi River for a promise of new homes to the west. Tunica was organized in 1836 and…
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“She was Called to Teach” Nancy Jones
Picture from Research provided by the Tunica Museum and Jennie Burton Some people become teachers because they view it as an easy job. It isn’t. Others become teachers because they have a calling. Nancy Jones had a calling and she followed that belief from Tennessee to Africa and back. Nancy was born January 8, 1860…
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Murder For Money and Hides: The Death of Abraham Levine
The Sunday of December 5th, 1926 looked to be promising for Abraham Levine. He had been told that a Mexican living out from Lula had hides for sale. All he had to do was meet the middle man of the deal, who knew where to take him. Mr. Levine had traveled halfway around the world…
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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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Private Willie Gordon, Tunica
Like many young men from rural Mississippi, Willie Gordon was drafted and reported for training in Little Rock, Arkansas. Whether he dreamed of becoming a hero or simply living through the conflict we will never know, because he died without ever leaving the country. To understand young Willie Brown, one must look at the U.S.…
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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…
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Coming of the Railroad to Tunica
The WPA records about Tunica County contain a great deal of information. One of the stories I found in the three boxes of papers and interviews deals with the coming of the railroad to Tunica County. Here is the story typed word for word: The first railroad to actually operate in Tunica County was the…
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The Dowd Legacy in Tunica and Coahoma Counties
William Francis and his younger brother Andrew Sidney Dowd were two extra ordinary men who had to deal with the carnage of the Civil War and the aftermath of Reconstruction. They managed to master both in their own ways. Let me start off by saying a few things. I am not related to either man…
My Delta World 