What is: The Magnolia Life Insurance Company, Mound Bayou, Mississippi What was: Dr TRM Howard owned the Magnolia Life Insurance Company, based in Mound Bayou. In 1952, after Medgar Ever’s graduation and after Myrlie’s sophomore year, the couple settled in Mound Bayou, the all black town in the Mississippi Delta. Medgar became an insurance […]
What is: Fort Monroe, Hampton, Virginia What was: Fort Monroe has an interesting place in American history. In late August 1619, the first ship carrying “20 odd” enslaved Africans arrived at Point Comfort in Virginia, where Fort Monroe is today. The Fort was built between 1819 and 1834 and occupied a strategic coastal defensive position […]
What is: Tobacco Farm Barns near Simsbury, CT What was: In June 1944, trains carrying 185 students from Morehouse College in Atlanta arrived in a northern Connecticut town of Simsbury. The students had arrived to work in the tobacco fields and harvest shade tobacco, then one of Connecticut’s biggest cash crops. These fields and barns are […]
What is: The closed Strider Academy, a PK-12 school in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi, which operated from 1971 until 2018. What was: The school was established in 1971 as a segregation academy to allow white parents to avoid sending their children to racially integrated public schools. Strider Academy was named for the sheriff who investigated and […]
What is: Tallahatchie Sheriff’s Office and Jail, Charleston, Mississippi What was: An imposing man weighing 270 pounds, Strider was the sheriff of Tallahatchie County and a wealthy plantation owner in the heart of the cotton-growing Delta. His property could be identified from miles away by the letters S-T-R-I-D-E-R, which he insisted be painted on the roofs […]
What is: Emmett Till Memorial Highway, US 49E intersects with Mississippi Highway No. 32, Henry Clarence Strider Memorial Highway, near Webb, Mississippi What was: An imposing man weighing 270 pounds, Strider was the sheriff of Tallahatchie County and a wealthy plantation owner in the heart of the cotton-growing Delta. His property could be identified from miles […]
What is: The old steel mill wheel at the front of Tredegar iron works which is today the main visitor center for the Richmond National Battlefield Park and the American Civil War Center at Historic Tredegar. What was: the iron works plant in Richmond opened in 1837 by a group of businessmen and industrialists who […]
What is: Original Route 66, ghostly and abandoned Route 66 near Hext, OK. What Was: Route 66 has been the path of migrants, dreamers, desperados, and an entire generation of vacationers discovering the way west. America’s Mother Road originally meandered more than 2,400 miles between Chicago and Los Angeles, including nearly 400 miles across Oklahoma. […]
What is: Closed Lunenburg High School. What was: On this site The Lunenburg Training School was founded in 1920 with support from the Jeanes Fund. In 1924, Rosenwald Funds aided in the construction of a larger school and later a shop building. More than 370 “Rosenwalds,” as they are commonly known, were built in Virginia […]
Hate runs deep and affects how things are memorialized… to the point of tearing down buildings. This story has lots in it…burning crosses, sequestered juries, second generation families carrying on… What is: Vacant lot in Sumner, Mississippi across the street from the courthouse. It was the site of the Delta Inn. What was: Built in […]