Person From the Past: My Great-Grandfather

When visiting my cousin Jay in Jackson, Mississippi, last summer, he showed me this portrait, which hangs on a wall at his home.

It's Samuel Henderson Stribling, his great-grandfather and mine, who died in 1934. The painting had once hung in one of the banks that SHS helped found, but corporate memory is short, and apparently one of the successor financial entities was going to toss the painting when it was rescued by a friend of Jay's.

I'm in possession of some notes my brother Jay wrote about SHS in the 1970s. The following is extracted from those notes, posted here to mark the man's 162nd birthday this week.

Samuel Henderson Stribling, my great-grandfather (my father's father's father) was born on May 6, 1848, either in Mississippi or Alabama. The uncertainty is because the family moved from South Carolina about the time of his birth.

Before the end of the War Between the States, he enlisted in the Confederate Army. At the close of the war, perhaps six months after his enlistment, he was a 1st sargeant of Cavalry, with Williams' Co., unattached regiment. He was with the army of Gen. Richard Taylor when it surrendered on May 4, 1865, at Citronelle, Alabama, a few miles north of Mobile. He was paroled at Jackson, Mississippi, on May 17, 1865, and went home.

He said that he lost his horse by betting it on a horserace and had to walk home from Jackson. I don't know if he was a resident of Philadelphia then or not.

In any case, he was considered a pioneer in Philadelphia because he arrived in town before the railroad came through in 1906. At his arrival, the town was a small village with red dirt (or red mud) streets and a log-cabin courthouse. There were only a few families, and no more than 100 people all together.

He married Delia Jay in 1874. From 1877, when my grandfather was born, until 1890, they had eight children (or 10?).

SHS seemingly began his career as a schoolteacher. He was later superintendent of education for Neshoba County. Later he got into money lending, which then developed into banking proper, and he was co-founder of one Philadelphia bank and later, another. He also served as chancery clerk for Neshoba County, though I don't know when.

[In the early 1980s, I saw microfilmed documents at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City that had his signature as chancery clerk in the 1890s.]