Word: yazoo
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Bolivar County lies down on the rich delta lands of Mississippi opposite the mouth of the Arkansas River. In 1887, when the track of what is now the dinky Yazoo & Mississippi Valley Railroad was laid, Bolivar's rich bottomlands were an uninhabited jungle. The railroad, eager for customers along the route, but fearing that white men would die off under the hot summer sun, decided to try Negroes. Isaiah T. Montgomery, a onetime slave of Jefferson Davis, and his cousin Benjamin T. Green were induced to start a colony. Thus was founded the town of Mound Bayou. Last week...
...second year of President Jefferson's first term (1801-05), Scovill is the epitome of all good things Yankee. It was started as a brass-button factory. Scovill buttons and Scovill notions were the best stock-in-trade of every 19th Century peddler from Bangor to the Yazoo Delta. Scovill made plates for daguerreotypes. Scovill made the Queen Anne burners for the lamps Rockefeller filled with kerosene. Scovill made time fuses, bullet jackets, shell cases in the War. And today the average U. S. citizen seldom goes from dawn to dusk without using a half-dozen Scovill products...
...members of the House of Representatives got a share of the pickings. Few great names (Washington's is an exception) escape McConaughy's scorn. Few schoolboys who remember that Patrick Henry asked for liberty or death have been told that he later made his pile in the Yazoo land swindle. Famed Chief Justice John Marshall is yanked from his niche, called the rock on which the Funding Fathers "rested secure in the enjoyment of special privileges...
...Susanna" which became the marching song for the California gold rush, $15.00 for "Old Folks at Home" because Foster let him sign himself as composer. "Old Folks at Home" started originally as "Way Down Upon de Pedee ribber." "Pedee" did not quite suit Foster. His brother suggested the Yazoo but that seemed harsh. Together they scoured the Atlas, picked on the Suwanee River in Florida. Foster's songs earned him $15,091, a rich amount for the times. But Foster drank up much of it and his wife had to get a job as a telegrapher. During his last...
Died. John Sharp Williams. 78, long-time Mississippi Congressman (Representative 1893-1909; Senator 1911-23): near Yazoo City, Miss...