In the Pines, page 4
The way white people told it, the first Black death in the Piney Woods was an accident. Someone drowned in one of the many creeks that curved through the tall woods. Maybe that was right. A woman lost her footing trying to wade across while carrying a load of firewood. A man fell in while trying to cut down a tree growing on the bank. White folks then and in the years since did not want to think about the alternative, that a human being might choose death over bondage. After a rainstorm, it would have been easy enough to step out from the muddy bank in a deep spot where the sandy floor dropped away. In the water between the pines, a person might just stop fighting and seek release. Afterward, white people who lived nearby marked this tragedy by naming the stream Nigger Creek.
In the antebellum era, the Black population of the Piney Woods remained small. White men and women wealthy enough to be enslavers usually settled elsewhere. Many kept moving west on the Three Chopped Way—a path named for the three slashes on trees used to mark the route—until they reached the deep soil of the area near Natchez. Enslavers that did settle in the Piney Woods often left in the 1830s as Choctaws and other Native Americans were forced out of more fertile lands in central Mississippi. Some Piney Woods farmers used enslaved people to grow cotton and other crops on more fertile bottomland along waterways like the Pearl. Enslaved people also worked at small, water-powered mills used to saw timber or grind corn for the local market.
After Emancipation, some formerly enslaved people began to see this region as a place of promise. Unlike in plantation districts, land in the Piney Woods was cheap or, in cases where the government still owned it, free. Some Black families acquired property by homesteading, working the five years required by the 1866 Southern Homestead Act to wrench farms out of the forest in order to earn title to public lands. Others bought. In 1870, a Black man named Ira Warren Lucas led a group of freed people into the flatlands between White Sand and Silver Creeks where they formed an all-Black settlement they named Lucas. There and elsewhere, newcomers mixed with established Black families—Williamses and Holloways and Fortenberrys, Polks and Johnsons and Magees.
As white men used violence to attack Black political rights during and after Reconstruction, landownership provided some small measure of security. On their own place, Black men could decide what and when to plant. Black women could avoid close interactions with white men. Black parents could protect their children.
For a while, some Black farmers prospered alongside their white neighbors, growing, making, and hunting most of what they needed and raising cotton or cutting timber to sell so they could pay for the rest. But when the timber companies came, everything began to change.
In the 1890s, men who had made their money cutting trees in places like Pennsylvania and Michigan discovered Mississippi. Unlike remaining old-growth forests in other places, Mississippi’s pines grew on gentle hills. Winters were mild. Wooded land, shunned by local farmers who knew firsthand the labor involved in clearing new fields, went for as little as $1.25 an acre. Great tracts of trees in the Piney Woods ended up for sale as Mississippi’s public colleges and railroads like the Gulf and Ship Island sold many of the thousands of acres they received through federal and state land grants. As timber companies bought them, they started pushing north from the Gulf Coast and inland from the Pearl and Pascagoula Rivers and their tributaries.
When large-scale lumbering arrived in the area, longleaf pines still grew where the original square-mile grid of downtown Prentiss would stand. Clusters of white and Black farm families worked the richer lands near creeks like White Sand, and trees covered the rest. Small settlements like Mt. Carmel and Blountville grew up around churches, schools, and stores. No real towns existed. People lived in the country.
Some folks liked that life. Others wanted a more modern existence, indoor plumbing, electric lights, stores and churches close by, a school that was more than one room with one teacher, easy access to a telegraph office and maybe even telephones, more possibilities for entertainment, mail every day, including packages from catalogs like Sears, Roebuck, new things to own and to do and to see. In a few churches, members opposed modern conveniences. At Bethany Baptist, founded in May 1819 and one of the oldest churches in the area, the congregation divided bitterly over wiring the sanctuary for electric light in 1940. For everyone else, it was not a sin to want new things.
P. W. “Prent” Berry, first cousin of my great-great-grandfather Albert Berry, knew a railroad was coming. J. J. Newman Lumber Company had opened huge sawmills in the new towns of Hattiesburg and Sumrall. To bring the pine logs in and ship lumber out, Newman Lumber began building their own line, the Pearl and Leaf Rivers Railroad. As the company cut over lands along their route, they kept extending their tracks westward. Old communities reached by the tracks prospered. New settlements sprang up overnight. Sawmill towns boomed.
Prent Berry owned the store at Blountville with two of his brothers and a large farm north of that settlement. The day the engineers planning the route came by the store, a storm flooded the flatlands there near Whitesand Creek. Berry suggested an alternate route. Instead of running through Blountville, maybe they should build the tracks across the hills farther north. So he made a deal with the railroad to lay the line through his farm. On a rainy Christmas Eve in 1902, workers shared a “bucket” of spirits to ward off the wet cold as they pushed to finish the route. Berry held a pine torch high for light as they hammered the last spike.
In return for building what was then the end of the line on his land, Prent Berry deeded every other block of the square-mile town of numbered streets and avenues named Leaf, Pearl, and Columbia to the railroad. The railroad built the depot. The lumber company cut the longleaf pines and shipped the logs to their sawmill in Sumrall to be made into lumber. Then Berry and the company sold the lots. A few businesses moved “over the ditch” from Blountville. Some of them built new buildings on Columbia Avenue, the main street that ran by the depot perpendicular to the tracks. Others used sledges, poles, and mules to relocate their buildings. Better-off white families in Mt. Carmel bought property and built Victorian and Craftsman-style houses. Named for its founder, Prentiss started as a business venture.
In 1903, when the state legislature awarded the settlement of about three hundred a village charter, Prentiss was a work in progress, a grid of dirt streets and construction sites beside a railroad depot. Already on Columbia Avenue, the Bank of Blountville welcomed savers and borrowers, and the Berry Mercantile served customers. On Leaf Avenue, Prentiss Baptist Church, built on land donated by Prent Berry, welcomed worshippers. A block over, what would become Prentiss Methodist Church was under construction. Across town on Third Street, a new school had opened.
In Prentiss, the new residential areas were for white people only. Later, a few Black people lived in small houses next to the cotton gins, the small sawmills, and the warehouses used to store lumber and cotton. Locals called the area Sawmill Quarters, Stamps Quarters, or just the Quarters.
The railroad made the town. For people who lived and shopped and worshipped and went to school in Prentiss, the railroad offered something new, a chance for locals to participate in modern life. For the pine forests, the railroad meant the beginning of the end.
While people had always cut the trees, big timber companies like Newman Lumber brought a new, mechanized form of logging to the Piney Woods. Unlike in the past, when loggers often felled select trees and left others standing, the new companies cut down everything. They built temporary “dummy” railroad lines deep into the old pine forests. They also used steam skidders, huge engines with mile-long cables for dragging logs from where they were cut to the railroad cars. Logs pulled in this way ravaged the land, cutting trenches in the ground and killing every small tree and sapling in their path. For Newman and other companies, time equaled money. They came in fast, clear-cut the trees, and then moved on to the next tract. When all the pines in the region were gone, the big companies shut down the huge sawmills, abandoned entire towns and villages, sold off their main railroad lines, and left the state to start the process again in another old-growth forest. In their wake, they left thousands of acres of bare and muddy ground.
The longleaf forests shaped how people settled this place, who decided to stay, and how they made a living there, even after most of the original pines were gone.
Family trees are metaphors. They share with pines both a basic structure and a tendency to flourish only when conditions are right. Online genealogical sites are not very helpful if some lasting authority like a church or a state has not created and preserved documents like birth, death, and marriage records. Some American families fill holes in repositories of official records because they have ancestors who saved stories about the past, papers, or other artifacts and passed down an interest in history to their descendants. Yet most people do not have access to these kinds of family archives.
Paradoxically, many white Americans have been able to ignore the past while also, if they desire, using government documents to research their ancestry. Despite my parents’ and grandparents’ lack of interest in family history, I can trace my own genealogy back for generations through census and other records. These documents reveal two waves of migration from Virginia through the Carolinas and later on to Mississippi. Without knowing it, when I moved to Charlottesville, I completed a circle, ending up about fourteen miles from White Hall, Virginia, where the Berry family migration began before the American Revolution.
By the standards of the colonial era, people like my ancestors could travel relatively easily along the fall line on the Great Valley Road. Unlike most overland trails, this route had actually been widened to handle wheels, and travelers could walk or ride horseback or even drive a wagon from Philadelphia down through the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia and across the Carolinas to Georgia. There were challenges. Wagons got stuck in the mud up to their axles. Horses went lame. Thieves stole coins and other easily carried valuables. People died and were buried along the route. In winter, ice and snow made the footing treacherous. In summer, mosquitoes and flies attacked the sweaty skin of horses and humans alike. Sometimes, travelers waited days at a ford for the water to drop, drove on in the rain, and then waited days again at the next crossing. In other places, alternate paths skirted mud or high water, but it was not always easy to know which fork to choose.
My ancestors almost certainly took this route south. Around 1765, John and Susannah Berry, my great-great-great-great-great-grandparents, were living in Virginia, where they had a son they named John. Five years later, they had a daughter they called Jemima. That same year they left the state, most likely taking a narrow track west, crossing the Blue Ridge Mountains at Rockfish Gap, and meeting the Great Wagon Road at Staunton, a distance of about thirty miles. During the family’s journey through North Carolina, Susannah gave birth to another son, and she and John named him German. Near the border between the Carolinas, the young family probably took the Great Wagon Road’s eastern fork toward Camden. Eventually they settled farther east in the Cheraws district.
For the four Berry siblings—John, Jemima, German, and David, born soon after the family arrived in South Carolina—that part of the district later called Chesterfield County became home. Over half a century they grew up, married people from South Carolina and just across the nearby border in North Carolina, and had lots of children. Longleaf pine forest covered most of Chesterfield, part of a landscape now called the Carolina Sandhills, just like it did the Berrys’ future home in the Mississippi Piney Woods. Before 1800 settlers there lived in a similar way, taking most of what they needed from the forest and growing the rest around the stumps of felled trees.
But the invention of the cotton gin in the late eighteenth century transformed how people lived in that area and also changed my family’s fortunes. Planters had been growing long staple cotton, a version of the commodity prized for its long fibers, on the Carolina coast for decades. Short staple cotton could be grown in a variety of locations where land was much cheaper, but it had another drawback: its sticky green seeds were very hard to separate from its short fibers. After Eli Whitney built a machine that would do that work, short staple cotton spread across upland South Carolina like fire in the pines. Farmers turned into planters, growing the white fiber rather than food in those fields cut from the forests. In the early years of the nineteenth century, the crop proved profitable almost everywhere in the state, but the boom did not last because the new crop stripped the sandy soil fast. A few years of cotton and then of corn, and yields often fell too low to make a profit. Planters responded by abandoning their worn acres and cutting trees to create fresh fields. Slavery had spread along with cotton production, but labor proved more valuable than land. When cotton or corn crops failed or planters simply wanted money, they sold people. By 1810, some of the Berrys had made enough money to join the enslaver class. Jemima’s husband, John Shivers, enslaved one person, David Berry enslaved two.
Sometime after 1810, all four Berry siblings left Chesterfield, joining a growing stream of Americans moving westward. Traveling overland to Mississippi in the decade after 1810 was probably more difficult than the journey south had been half a century before. The Great Wagon Road carried travelers only as far as Augusta. A bad but passable track then crossed Georgia to the state capital at Milledgeville. There, migrants picked up a trail the US Army began constructing out of Creek and Choctaw paths in 1807. The Three Chopped Way eventually ran from Milledgeville all the way west to Natchez on the Mississippi River, connecting the settled east to the future states of Alabama and Mississippi. By the middle of the 1810s, a ferry carried travelers over the Alabama River, and causeways made of felled trees crossed bogs and smaller waterways. Wagons could pass from Milledgeville as far as Fort St. Stephens on the Tombigbee River, an improved section of the Three Chopped renamed the Federal Road. West of there, the Berry families had to transfer their belongings to pack horses and either walk or ride the route from the Tombigbee River west to the Pearl.
Whether or not they traveled all those hard miles together, by 1820 John, German, and David Berry and their sister and brother-in-law, Jemima and John Shivers, lived scattered across the new state of Mississippi. German enslaved four people, and David enslaved eight. Living apart, the Berry siblings might have realized how much they wanted to be close. Or perhaps the plan all along had been to spread out and find a place where everyone could buy land together. The rolling ridges of giant trees in the Piney Woods must have reminded them of their Chesterfield home. Maybe, when they saw the old forests still standing, they felt like they had traveled in a loop back to their Carolina childhoods. Maybe, after all the hard miles, that feeling was enough.
However the siblings made their decision, by the mid-1820s my ancestors had settled in the well-watered country along Bowie and Silver Creeks about eight miles west of the Pearl River and between ten and twenty miles north of the Three Chopped Way, on either side of what was then the border between Simpson and Lawrence Counties. Their timing was right. Recent changes in federal law prevented people from buying land on installment but also dropped the price to $1.25 an acre and the minimum purchase to eighty acres. The wealthiest of my Berry ancestors, enslavers David and German Berry, began filing patents, how individuals bought what had been Native American land from the federal government, in 1825.
A few years later, in 1830, President Andrew Jackson led a sharply divided Congress to pass the Indian Removal Act. Soon afterward, the State of Mississippi used the new law to negotiate the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek with the Choctaws, forcing most members to give up their land there in exchange for territory out west in what would become Oklahoma. The removal of other nations living in Mississippi, including the Chickasaws, followed, opening up land for white settlement across the state. Especially in the rich river deltas and bottomlands, many of the new settlers were enslavers. In Mississippi, the expansion of slavery and the theft of Native American land went hand in hand. By 1840, relatives of the original four Berry siblings owned hundreds of acres, mostly in a band stretching from west of Shivers, a Simpson County community named after Jemima’s husband, John, or their descendants to east of the Berry Cemetery in what would later become Jefferson Davis County.
This pine forest family reunion did not last. Jemima Shivers died soon after she arrived, sometime before 1827. John Berry and his wife, Edith Ann Polk Berry, built a log cabin on a branch of Silver Creek sometime in the mid-1820s, but my great-great-great-great-grandparents died within a decade. Their son Henry Berry, called Harry, and his wife, Zilla Huckaby Berry, my great-great-great-grandparents, moved into the cabin and purchased the surrounding land with a patent registered in 1840.
Like the longleaf pines that grew across their land, the next generation of our family sank their roots deep. Harry and Zilla’s son Albert Gallatin Berry, my great-great-grandfather and Oury Berry’s grandfather, lived his whole life in this part of Mississippi, except the years he served in the Confederate army. He lost an eye at Antietam. After the war, he married Lucy Mullins in a ceremony witnessed by his first cousin and fellow Confederate veteran Abner Wilkes Berry, the older brother of P. W. Berry, founder of Prentiss. Albert and Lucy Berry’s oldest son, Henry Jackson Berry, born in 1874, was my great-grandfather and Oury Berry’s father. He died twelve years before I was born.
Everyone has ancestors, but family trees, genealogies filled with relatives’ names and the dates when they were born and died, depend on archives. And official repositories of documents in turn depend on a society’s ideas about who matters. What people with power think is important gets recorded and saved. Other information is often lost.
