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Friars Point, Mississippi

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It can be difficult to find a place in the Delta where you can go sit, down by the riverside…

What is: Mississippi River at Friars Point

What was: Founded in 1836 along the Mississippi River, Friars Point was once the largest cotton shipping center south of Memphis.  The historic port town remains the only place in Coahoma County with public access to the banks of the Mississippi River and is one of a few public access points to the river in the entire Mississippi Delta region.

Blues legend Robert Johnson is said to have played in front of Hirsberg’s Drugstore, as did Muddy Waters.  Johnson referred to Friars Point in the song “Traveling Riverside Blues.” The town has been written about by famous Mississippi writers Tennessee Williams and William Faulkner. It also is the birthplace of country music legend Conway Twitty.

Friars Point was the rendezvous point for General William T. Sherman and Admiral David Porter who under orders from U.S. Grant came to Friars Point in December of 1862 to plan the naval attack on Vicksburg during Grant’s first Vicksburg campaign. The town served as a major staging point for Union troops. It was a rendezvous point for 45 transport ships and gunboats of Gen. Sherman on his way to Vicksburg.

During the 1875 elections, white supremacists intensified efforts to undermine and harass the Reconstruction government in Mississippi.  Friars Point was among the places that riots were instigated to intimidate black voters.

It has a population of about 839 as of July 1, 2022.

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Mound Bayou and Cotton

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What is: Cotton Gins at Mound Bayou, Mississippi

What was: Mound Bayou, in the Mississippi Delta was founded in 1887 by former slaves, with a vision to be a self-reliant, autonomous, all-black community.  For decades, it thrived and prospered, becoming famous for empowering its black citizens. The town also became known as a haven from the virulent racism of the Jim Crow South.

Annyce Campbell was born in Mound Bayou in 1924, the town was thriving. “You name it, we had it!” she told NPR  “We had everything but a jail, to tell you the truth!”  She told NPR about the town’s heydays, when Mound Bayou was home to dozens of businesses, three cotton gins, a sawmill, a cottonseed oil mill, a bank — all of them black-owned.

Mound Bayou was initially prosperous and known worldwide for its quality of cotton.  Mount Bayou became the place Delta farmers, including white farmers, brought their cotton to get ginned and for shipment. There was the Montgomery Gin, Farmer’s Gin, McCarty Gin, Mound Bayou Gin Company, Planters Gin, Presley Gin and Thompson Gin.

For farmers, receiving the Mound Bayou stamp on their cotton allowed them to increase the prices of their cotton bales. As the town continued to grow, residents annually produced 3,000 bales of cotton (5000 bales in 1908)and 2,000 bushels of corn on 6,000 acres of farmland. For a time, Mound Bayou was the third-largest cotton-producing town in the South. (source: Jackson Free Press and https://ourmissmag.com/uncategorized/remembering-mound-bayou-mississippis-black-wall-street/).

In 1912, at the only black owned cotton seed oil mill opening, attended by 15000 people, one attendee is reported to have stated that cotton was king, and blacks were one step closer to the throne now. (Source: New York Tribune, https://digitalcommons.csumb.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1257&context=caps_thes

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George and Polly Gilmore, Montpelier, Virginia

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What is: George and Polly Gilmore’s farm, Montpelier, Virginia.

What was: This was George and Polly Gilmore’s farm in the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Both George and Polly were born into slavery at James Madison’s Montpelier. The Gilmore family lived here until the 1930’s.  The cabin is representative of not just the Gilmore family’s early years of freedom, but countless other newly freed African Americans in the Piedmont region of Virginia during Reconstruction.

President Madison died in 1836. When Dolley Madison sold Montpelier in 1844, George Gilmore and his future wife Polly conveyed with the property. They were married in 1850 and were freed in 1865 when Federal troops occupied Orange County.  Excavation units in the yard allowed historians to uncover what appears to be the remains of a Confederate encampment.

Like millions of African Americans throughout the South, many emancipated slaves worked on the same plantations where they once labored. After emancipation, Gilmore stayed at Montpelier, and is listed in census records as having worked as a saddle maker and as a tenant farmer. In 1873 the Gilmores built this cabin, and in 1901 purchased the 16 acres of land from Dr. James A. Madison, the great-nephew of President Madison. Members of the family lived on the farm until the early 1930s.

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