Out On The Mudline

Some Leave, Others Are Among Multiplying Millions

By W. P. Sissell

    The majority of my time this past week has been used in completing the listing work on Shipp Cemetery. We got the surveying done about three years ago and have not gotten around to any further work. Nannette and I are to the editing point now. I am appalled at the number of errors I have in the first pages,  before I got accustomed to a set pattern for the entries.

    As I went through the listing I was impressed with the number of people who passed so young. It became apparent that our medical services have improved tremendously. Maybe an indication of that fact is change in the occupancy of the property where the Baptist Hospital in Oxford is located. Although I do not know about the oldest occupants, I do know that a lot of the pine trees and locusts (fence post timber) in the area were set out by men who lived in the C.C.C. (Civilian Conservation Corp) camp located there in the thirties. Those buildings were modified to become an animal sale barn. I’ve spent many an afternoon there.

    One of my brother’s in law got a job as educational advisor in a camp at Brookhaven. He had a job teaching school but the county warrants, with which he was paid, were discounted when he cashed them (not cashed at full value).

    Clayton Kennedy, who rented our small farm at Crowder, told me about his days in the C.C.C. in Washington State. By taking his discharge in Washington he got enough money to take him several hundred miles toward Mississippi. When the bus was passing through a small town that appealed to him, he looked for a job in that town.  As I remember, he told me that he had five different jobs in getting home to Northeast Mississippi. He was a fine young man—stayed on that place for seventeen years. Clayton came to me one fall wanting to know how to get money to buy a farm. Dad and I took him to see Mr. Bill Trusty. When he found the place he wanted the man agreed to finance the sale himself—provided they took out insurance on the loan.

    Clayton’s oldest son became a veterinarian, several years ago the second son was head of the Physics Department at Northeast Community College and their sister was a teacher. I got to know this family because of Enid Reservoir.

The Scattering

    Over the past week Nannette and I attended funerals of several friends. As usual at these we ran into people that we had known when living on the Mud Line. One of these this time was a young woman who introduced herself as “Lumpy’s” daughter, Illa. I think that I told her I remembered her because my mother named her.  At any rate, Illa gave me a special mission. In remodeling her house she got beams from the “Peter Brown” area which she used in the remodeling. She said that the beams, hand hewed and drilled for pegs, came from a cotton gin in that area. Her family lived in that area before Enid Reservoir moved them to Jumper’s Chapel. Illa, I have not been able to find anyone who remembers that gin.

Multiplying Millions

    I told you that two of our grandsons have brought young ladies by to introduce to Nannette and me as our new granddaughters in law? We welcome them to the family.

    Years ago for me, the Dean of the School of Agricul-ture at Mississippi State, in talking to us students, got around to the fact that we as agriculture students had to be able to “feed the multiplying millions.” We are multiplying.

    Our hope and wish for you is a great week although you must remember that we have one of those big “thunder boomers” coming up –“its gotta bust dem buds.”