Word: natchez
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Port Wentworth, Ga. built a new industrial water plant to attract the Southern Paperboard company. Natchez, Miss, "clarified" the state stream pollution law to get the Johns-Manville insulation board plant. In Greenville, Tenn., some schools joined in educating the populace in the art of dairy farming to help the Pet Milk Co. build up a milk supply for its new processing factory...
Johnson's diary is fragmentary and generally superficial. What makes it good skimming is its colloquial freshness and directness. Johnson never wrote like a man who expected that Louisiana State University would one day publish his literary remains. He recorded the visits to Natchez of Henry Clay and Andrew Jackson, but with true neighborly interest and relief he also noted that "Mrs Mary Morris has a fine Daughter Last night. She got married 24th May 1849. Thus it is 9 months and 5 days...
...free at eleven by the same master who owned and freed his mother, Johnson became an apprentice barber. At 21, he opened a shop of his own in Natchez and prospered. When he married, in 1835, he was a solid man of property, owner of four slaves and the most prosperous barbershop in town. That same year, he began to keep a shrewd and candid diary; when he died in 1851, shot in a boundary dispute by a half-breed, the diary filled 2,000 pages. Rediscovered almost 90 years later in the attic of his old house, William Johnson...
...Such Things Ocur." Natchez tempers ran high in Johnson's day. He reports scores of brawls fought with every conceivable hand weapon from bowie knives to whips. Throughout the diary, doctors and businessmen have at each other with such fury that Johnson seems to be stooping to trivia when he records that "Old man Guinea John" stabbed a foe "Just below the navle, Tis supposed that the nife...
...gossip right in his shop, but he also got around town. He owned a farm, did a steady business as money lender, ran a thriving bathhouse and hired out slaves. Next to business, his passion was "manly sport." He seems to have spent as much time at the busy Natchez race track as he did in his shop, bet regularly, and finally owned his own race horses. Marksmanship and hunting ran racing a close second. Unfortunately, Johnson would shoot anything that moved, from alligators to robins. A typical day's bag: "2 Squirrells, 1 white Crane...