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.]

Travel Orts

I made a brief stop last month to see the Ellis County Courthouse in Waxahachie, not far south of Dallas. Texas has some grand old county courthouses, many dating from the late 19th-century golden age of courthouse construction, but I've never seen one more ornate.

I visited the fine Witte Museum while in San Antonio, and it had an exhibit about the development of public parks in the city from the 1800s on. That meshed nicely with the book I was reading on the trip, a biography of Fredrick Law Olmsted, though he didn't work on any of San Antonio's parks. I was especially interested in reading about the evolution of the much-beloved Brackenridge Park, which is behind the museum.

The museum also had an exhibit about wild west shows -- the sort of late 19th-century/early 20th-century extravaganza that made Buffalo Bill Cody and other showmen famous. Lots of posters, and not just about Buffalo Bill's show, but some of his competitors as well, whose names and claims to fame now exist in dusty obscurity. Here's a fast fact: in the '30s, Tom Mix launched a wild west show, or maybe a circus with wild west elements, called the Tom Mix Circus; but the time had passed for such entertainments, and it failed.

The Witte, incidentally, was where my family and I waited in line to see a moon rock in 1970. They had one on display, about the size of a small, squarish gray golf ball. We probably waited an hour to see it. "We waited to see that?" my brother Jay complained. In hindsight, I suppose he had a point. Pretty much every planetarium and science museum has a moon rock now, and people walk right past them.

I exited I-10 in Flatonia, Texas, for two reasons. One, I've always liked that name. Two, I wanted to find a mail box. I found one, along with a nice-looking cemetery.

I drove on US 90 from Flatonia to Schulenburg, where I got a milkshake at a Whataburger -- an authentic Texas experience, if you ask me. Near the Whataburger I saw a sign for a store called Double Shot Guns and Liquor. Now that's a winning combo.

On I-10 just outside of Katy, Texas, I saw an odd truckload by the side of the road. It took a moment to figure out what it was: a load of windmill blades, tied together, bound for the green-energy revolution, I suppose -- transported there by diesel.

I timed my transit through Harris County, on I-10, which takes you right through the heart of Houston, to compare it with my driving experience in Austin. It took me only 50 minutes during a mid-day Monday. Sometimes traffic slowed, but it never stopped.

Also of note in the metro Houston area: There are a lot of billboards advertising the services of various shysters who say they want to help out with your "Ike claim." Such is the lingering effects of that storm, which the National Hurricane Center calls the third-costliest in U.S. history.

En route to Louisiana, I detoured into Beaumont to see Spindletop. The small open-air museum at the site was closed, so maybe I missed something special. Otherwise, considering how important Spindletop is in the history of Texas -- of the oil industry -- of mankind's quest for energy, the spot is hardly worth stopping to see. There's a replica derrick and an obelisk with a star on top, as you see at other historic spots in Texas. That's it.

In Lafayette, I saw more than one group of convicts taking care of the roadside. Convicts in orange (for traffic safety) and black-and-white convict stripes (for tradition). Not quite like the chain gangs of old, I suspect, but I wouldn't want to be out there in the hot sun with them.

The main route north out of Baton Rouge is US 61, named the Scenic Highway in town. What does one see on the Scenic Highway? A lot of chemical plants -- several miles of them. Impressive, really, but that's stretching that "scenic" concept beyond recognition.

I passed through Philadelphia, Mississippi, hometown of my father's family. One of the places I saw there was the town cemetery. I have relatives there, in this case my paternal grandparents and some of my uncles and aunts.

The last thing I saw on the trip wasn't actually Superman (see July 10). I spent about ten minutes in Effingham, Illinois, standing under this enormous cross, which is nearly 200 feet high.

The cross was made with some 180 tons of steel and is able to withstand very high winds, according to various sources. Each of the Ten Commandments has a display at the base, forming a ring around the structure. Metropolis' Superman statue would look puny next to the Effingham Cross.

Elvis Rex

In 1979, Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi were in at a SNL skit that involved both of them playing Elvis impersonators at the same time, the Elvi. Aykroyd was the svelte, late '50s Elvis; Belushi was something else again. "We try to do the King justice," said Belushi. "I have a 'specially tough time 'cause I'm playin' the latter part of the King's life, after he discovered carbohydrates."

There's no end of possible iterations from the arc of such a lore-encrusted, over-famed life. Tupelo, Mississippi, birthplace of Elvis Presley, will not be denied its Elvi -- which would be the infant and the boy, up until the time when the Presleys up and moved away to Memphis, when the lad was 13. US 45 is the main north-south highway through Tupelo, and the town has made sure that visitors don't need Onstar to find the King's natal site. ELVIS BIRTHPLACE, the signs clearly state, with arrows to direct you, first to an exit from US 45, then eastward on Main Street. One left turn off of Main, onto Elvis Presley Dr., and you're there.

It's actually a kind of mid-sized city park that's been taken over by the Elvis business. The birthplace, a very modest two-room house, is at one corner of the park. Elsewhere are the museum, a fountain, a memorial wall, a chapel, the church that young Elvis attended (brought to the site), the Presleys' mid-40s car or one just like it, and a bronze life-sized statue, "Elvis at 13." Pretty much everything in the park, except for the statue, is larger than the house itself. Even the museum's gift shop is larger.

By the time I got there on the afternoon of June 18, the chapel and the church were closed. I looked at the memorial wall and its anecdotes of Elvis, but skipped the museum, except for the gift shop, where I got Elvis postcards and an Elvis souvenir spoon for Yuriko, who collects spoons, not Elvis bric-a-brac. I also paid $4 to go into the house. I hate the idea that Scientologists might get a bit of the money I spent, since Lisa Marie Presley must surely get some cut, but life is full of niggling compromises. I wanted to see the inside of the house.

All two rooms of it -- a bedroom in period furnishings, and a kitchen, also in period. You wait on the porch until the guide opens the door, and then she gives a short talk about the house and the Presleys. I asked a few questions, as my wont. No, the furniture isn't original. Yes, the house is located in the same place as in 1935. (Presumably, it wasn't on Elvis Presley Dr. in those days.) Yes, Vernon Presley, his dad, went to prison for a little while for minor check fraud. No, three wise men didn't show up at the Presleys in the weeks after his birth. Actually, that last question didn't come up.

"Elvis at 13" is an interesting statue (on this page, toward the bottom), featuring kid Elvis in overalls and clutching his first gee-tar. That was the age at which he moved to Memphis for his date with destiny a few years later at Sun Records. At least, that's what the statue is supposed to suggest.

Instead, it got me in a counterfactual frame of mind. What if Vernon had decided against the move? What if Elvis Presley had grown to manhood in Tupelo? Would he now be a retired truck driver, living in a little house in Tupelo, whose old friends remember him as a pretty good singer, back in the day? Would Mr. Presley smile when seeing clips in black-and-white of the early antics of the late King of Rock 'n' Roll, Jerry Lee Lewis, on late-night oldies record commercials? "Hell, I used to sing like that sometimes, 'cept I never did play the piano."

Longwood

A good Fourth of July to all. Eat meat, drink beer, blow things up. It's your patriotic duty. Posting will begin again after the holiday.

At some places, it's hard to find a good vantage for a photo. At a place like Longwood, it was hard to find a bad vantage. I took a number of exterior shots, but I liked this one best.

After leaving Baton Rouge on June 17, en route to Jackson, I made my way to Natchez, Mississippi, and spent some time wandering around its pleasant downtown. I wanted to tour one antebellum home before I left -- why come to Natchez and not do that? Actually, a tireless fan of planter architecture could probably spend a week in Natchez and nearby parts of Mississippi and Louisiana just looking at splendid homes built before the War Between the States, and I'm sure someone has done that. The town itself has a lot of tour-worthy antebellum plantation homes, if travel literature is to be believed, and I think it's a fair assessment.

My first choice was the House on Ellicott Hill, which is downtown overlooking the Mississippi. Though the house of a merchant, not a planter, it sounded interesting. When I got there, it was closed, because it was closed every Wednesday.

Longwood wasn't far away, and its description as an octagonal house intrigued me. Turning off a modern Natchez street, you get to Longwood by driving down a long gravel road, narrow and winding through a lot of large, mature trees. The effect is a mild illusion that you're leaving the 21st century behind. But the house itself is hard to see from a moving car, due to the trees. To get a good perspective, you have to be on foot.

Ahead of the tour, I spent a while circling the house on foot, marveling at its beautiful oddness. An octagon house with an onion dome. The man who commissioned the house, Haller Nutt, clearly wanted something distinctive. As it turned out, he got something much more distinctive than he planned.

The exterior of the building, and the interior of the basement, which is only partly underground, were the only parts of the structure ever completed. Not even Haller Nutt, millionaire cotton planter, could keep his skilled Northern artisans on the job in 1861. They skidaddled back home at the outbreak of war. Nutt, like so many others, suffered a serious reversal of fortunes because of the war, and he didn't even live to see the end of it, dying in 1864 of natural causes. Remarkably, his family managed to hold on to the house for some decades after that, living in the finished basement, which is spacious enough by modern middle-class standards. But they never had the scratch to complete the place according to the original plans.

The organization that now owns Longwood, the Pilgrimage Garden Club, took it under the condition that it never be "finished." For a modern visitor, it's better that way. The basement is pleasantly furnished and decorated, like so many tourist-ready museum houses of antebellum vintage, but the home's unfinished floors make it memorable. This is the "first floor."

Longwood, then, isn't an antebellum house. It's a bellum house, with most of its splendor gone with the wind. This is the view up into the dome.

Item From the Past: My Own Mississippi

I have to like a place with a street sign like this:

The sign was at the corner of Stribling Street and the more blandly named Forest Park Circle in Philadelphia, Miss., when I photographed it in February 1990. According to Google Maps, the street's still there -- it's a short stretch between Pecan Ave. and Columbus Ave.

Philadelphia was my father's hometown, though like many Southerners in the last century and a half, he Gone To Texas as a young man. It was also the home of members of the Dees family, at least one of whom married a Stribling, eventually becoming my paternal grandparents.

Fairly distant cousins whom I do not know clearly established a drug store and a small department store in Philadelphia. This is how they appeared in 1990:

Again, Google Maps tells me they are still around, though it's hard to believe that Wal-Mart hasn't eaten their lunch (and there is a Wal-Mart in the 39350 Zip code, which puts it close by). Back in 1990, I didn't wander into the drug store or the department store to see if I shared a name with anyone inside, though I probably should have. If they're still around the next time I visit, I will do just that.