Hattiesburg

We drove to Hattiesburg, where we had booked a room for the night. We had dinner at a brewery in downtown, which was a charming area with lots of old buildings. One of the most dominant was the Hattiesburg Coca-Cola bottling plant. It opened in 1910, and at one point it operated all day and produced more than 1.24 million cases of Coke a year.



In 1955, most of the bottling operations were moved to a more modern facility. The building has since had a few different uses. It's been a restaurant, bar and nightclub. Currently it's being used as an events venue.



Hattiesburg has a lot of neat old homes and buildings. I wish we had more time there, but we needed to hit the road. I did make one quick stop and got a shot of this old ghost sign on the side of an abandoned-looking building.



The other passengers in the car were eager to finish the drive to Florida, but I was able to make one last stop before we left Mississippi. There was this beautiful old home, which had looked like it had been abandoned for awhile. But this one seems like it's being taken care of - the first floor has gotten a fresh coat of paint. Hope this old place can be restored.

Jackson

As our Spring Break road trip headed through Mississippi, we made a stop in the state capitol of Jackson. I was kinda surprised at how small and compact downtown Jackson was, but it did have a good collection of old and interesting buildings. This is the Mississippi state capital building, which was built in 1903.







Not too far away was this neat old building, which was once the Morris Ice Company. It was built in 1924, and was one of the largest distributors of ice in Mississippi.



The Morris Ice Company was founded in 1875. Back then, ice wasn't something that was easily acquired, at least in the South. Companies would acquire blocks of ice carved out of the frozen lakes of the northern states. It would be packed in boxes with sawdust, and then shipped down the Mississippi River. 

 

Eventually, technology was developed to actually freeze and produce ice in factories like this.





The ice factory was in operation until 1988. After that, it seems like the building was left abandoned.





Someone bought the building and had made plans to turn it into a restaurant and music venue in 2019. But I'm guessing the pandemic messed up those plans.

This Old House

As we drove through Mississippi, I had to make a detour to visit this grand old home.



The house was built in 1892, in the late Victorian Queen Anne style. The house was occupied until the 1990s, but sadly it has been left empty and abandoned. But even in its advanced state of decay, you can see so many architectural charms. There are the numerous stained glass windows. There are the wooden gingerbread embellishments. There are the remains of the delicate decorations around the front porch. Compare this to the cookie-cutter McMansions you see in the sprawling suburbs of today. They definitely don't make them like this anymore.



This old house seems to truly encompass the tragic nature of abandoned places. There was such care and talent put into building this home. Generations of people lived here. But for whatever reason, it was left abandoned. It was forgotten, and left to detoriate and rot and collapse.

Perhaps it can still be saved. Every place has a history, and has a story. It feels like this place still has room for another chapter in its history.

Into Mississippi

From Gould we headed southeast, and eventually crossed over the Big River on the fancy new bridge at Lake Village. The bridge deposits you into Mississippi, rather unceremoniously, by a casino. This was still the Delta, with its miles of flat fields and wetlands. We drove by an occasional old plantation home, and through numerous small (but seemingly struggling) towns.

The route the GPS picked out for us took us near this beautiful old church, the New Hope Missionary Baptist Church. It was built in 1918, but has been left empty and abandoned now for several decades. Although it felt lonely and forlorn there, you could almost feel a sense of stubborn pride still lingering in the old building. It's still here. Weathered and faded, it still remains.

Mississippi - New Hope Missionary Baptist Church

As we left Destin to return home to Arkansas, I put the route into Google Maps. It would be a long drive (especially with two kids in the car), and the route that my phone picked out for us took us to Mobile and then along a series of roads that cut across Alabama and Mississippi. Luckily our toddler loves cars and doesn't seem to mind sitting in a carseat very long.

I was thrilled to see that our way home would actually pass by the town of Estill in Mississippi, which has a neat old abandoned church. And after several hours of driving, we finally arrived at the New Home Missionary Baptist Church, which was built in 1918.



The wooden Gothic Revival church has been described as "a rare example of an early twentieth century rural African American Delta church." The church survived the Great Flood of 1927, since it sits along some high ground near Deer Creek.





Like most Delta communities, Estill was once a thriving little town. But now few people live here, and the old church has been abandoned for decades. It was named as one of the 10 Most Endangered Historic Places in Mississippi in 2017. In 2019, the church was awarded a $24,500 grant from the Mississippi Heritage Trust, which added a new metal roof to the building. The roof helps keep rain water from entering the structure and causing further deterioration.



While there aren't any church services held here, some members of the old congregation have returned. There is a small cemetery next to the church, which has a few recent burials. One of those burials is from a Mrs. Rebecca "Li'l Bit" Ellis, who was born in 1892 and who passed away in 2002 at the age of 109. It's hard to imagine what all she must have seen and experienced in those years.



It started raining when we were there, with ominous gray clouds hanging over the horizon.



A few hours later, a tornado would rip through this part of Mississippi. Sadly, twenty-six people would be killed as the massive storm hit the towns of Rolling Fork and Black Hawk.

We drove across the river and made it into Arkansas, and actually drove through the storm cell that would later develop into tornadoes in Mississippi. It was bad then, we actually had to pull over in Dumas to wait out a heavy band of rain. We made it through the storm as we neared Pine Bluff, and saw the sun try to break through the heavy clouds. It was near sunset, so the light turned golden as it met with the dark gray storm clouds.



It seemed so bizarre then, to have driven through a place just hours before it would be hit by a tornado. You just never know when a bad storm will hit, and it seemed so strange to have been so close. Of course we would learn what it would be like to experience all that first-hand, when a tornado moved through our neighborhood just a few days later.