Mobile, Alabama

The traffic in Canton, MS, slowed me so that I didn't arrive on the Gulf at Biloxi, Mississippi, until after dark.  By the time I got settled in at a motel it was too late to have dinner at the Blow Fly Inn in Gulfport.  That was about the only disappointment of the trip.

The next morning I headed across the border into Alabama.  I quickly noticed that the "Heart of Dixie" has been discretely minimized on the license plates and a slogan with broader appeal is emblazoned on the bottom.


I had emailed the Mobile Public Library to inquire about the availability of any Citronelle newspapers or the Mobile Register for 1896 to 1900.  I soon learned that the Genealogy and local history works are actually kept in the modest building next door to the gleaming white library on Government Street.


Librarian Hesper Montfordhad a package of information waiting for me.  She had two small books on Citronelle ready and got me onto a digital microfilm reader/printer to run through the Mobile Register.


I soon located two articles on the death and funeral of William S. Burroughs and another on the subsequent re-marriage of his widow.  I was now ahead of schedule with a free afternoon ahead of me and only needed advice on where to find a good Red Beans and Rice lunch.





Before leaving the area, I strolled down Government Street to the Barton Academy where W.S. Burroughs' sons attended high school.  It is a very impressive building.

Canton, Mississippi. Something Old, Something New.

By mid-afternoon of day 2, I had reached central Mississippi.  I was ready for lunch and hoping for some red beans and rice.  This is cotton country, by the way.


I spotted an exit for Canton, Mississippi and pulled off the Interstate.  As I headed into town, I realized I might have made a mistake.  The line of cars leaving town was over a mile long and not moving.   The line of cars heading into town was barely moving.

I had picked the one day of the autumn when Canton holds a huge and famous flea market.  If I hadn't been on a specific mission, I would have spent the afternoon here.  A town on the Mississippi Blues Trail with a beautiful old courthouse and many restored buildings, why not spend a full day?





Canton is also home to one of the largest automobile plants in the United States.  On the way out of town, I took Nissan Parkway past the plant.


I stopped at the next exit and settled for lunch at Big Daddy's barbecue outlet in the freeway gas station.  They were sold out of red beans and rice - but oh, the barbecued ribs!  Southern comfort food at its best.

A Trip to the Gulf Coast - 2016

Whatever has happened to Tom's Travel Blog?

A good question - I have been on hiatus for quite a while, with only two posts since our return from Egypt.  But Linda has departed for two weeks in Spain with her regular "traveling ladies" group from the Red Hats - and that leaves me free to chase my computer history ghosts.

I headed out a few days ago to Citronelle, Alabama where William S. Burroughs died in 1898.  That gave me the opportunity to drop into Mobile, Alabama and check some newspapers; make a stop in St. Louis, home to Burroughs' American Arithmometer company to check more papers and, finally, stop in Macoupin County, Illinois to gather information on another American Arithmometer founder.

Since this was late in the election season, I took a few pictures of campaign signs along the route.  If you arrived from another planet and drive the midwest countryside North to South, you will no doubt come to the conclusion that there is only one person running for president this year.



The presidential campaign signs are quite a bit more sparse than usual but in driving through seven states I only saw Trump signs except for one small Hillary sign amidst some mobile homes in tiny Shipman, Illinois.  I assume there are more Hillary supporters to be found in the larger cities.

I did see more than the usual evidence of this sentiment expressed in hand-made signs, though.



You certainly get a feel for the diversity of American driving this route.  In the south, there is a much greater inclination to name things after politicians - especially senators.  Not to be outflanked by the Bankhead Highway, Mississippi has designated most of I-55 as the Eastland Memorial Highway. If you are not old enough to recall the senator, you can get a history lesson in the middle of this article.  You might be as surprised as I was to find him memorialized here.


Think of Mississippi and Alabama and you might think NASCAR racing.  But, as I cruised down I-55, I was passed by a jet truck.


I caught up to the vehicle at a rest stop and took a couple more pictures.




We'll continue on to the Gulf in subsequent posts.

A Visit to Pass Christian, Mississippi

Saturday, we drove over to Mississippi to visit with a cousin of Linda's.  Pass Christian has always been one of our favorite spots on the Gulf Coast.  We first discovered it in early 2003, the year that I retired and we took a leisurely two-month drive through the Southeastern U.S.

Leaving New Orleans, we looked for the scenic route along the Gulf.  We passed through Bay St. Louis and into Pass Christian.


Both of these communities had amazing old and picturesque homes near the white sandy beach.  A long stretch of Scenic Drive in Pass Christian was designated as a National Historic District consisting of 2200 acres and 109 buildings.  We drove that road several times in both 2003 and 2004.  If we had known that it would be destroyed in 2005, I would have taken a lot more pictures!  The town had taken a direct hit from hurricane Camille back in 1969, but the historic homes, being fairly high above the water line, mostly survived.  In 2005, Katrina would pretty much erase the historic district from the map.

Here is an example of one of the historic homes as it appeared in the application for the National Register.


And this is a picture that we took in 2003 with Scenic Drive in the background.


Now, in 2012, I stopped in the same general area to take this picture.


That lonely stump from a Live Oak is now a sculpture.


You can see more of the artist, Marlin Miller, and his work at this link.

While the area did survive Camille, Katrina was too much for most residents to consider rebuilding.  So the scenic drive now consists of a number of foundations, "for sale" signs and even some trees with debris still hanging from the upper branches as a reminder.



UPDATE: 2/172012
I found this link to a good set of photos of homes before the 2005 hurricane.  While they are from a bit farther East in Biloxi, they give a good idea of what is missing from these current photos.

The Game of the Century

I had planned on arriving in  New Orleans on Monday night and spending two nights there.  This turned out to be a case of poor planning.  I didn't check the sports calendar and was unaware of the fact that the BCS college championship football game was to be played in New Orleans on Monday night.

If a game between the number one and number two ranked college football games wasn't enough to bring a crowd to New Orleans, consider that the two teams turned out to be Alabama and LSU!    If that didn't make it a big game, the fact that the two teams had met earlier in the year and played to a tie after four quarters before LSU won it in overtime just added to the excitement.  The partisans of the SEC take their football seriously.  It wasn't long after we left Tupelo, Mississippi that I tuned in radio station WWL in New Orleans and realized this was going to be a big game.  We made a couple of calls and quickly confirmed that there were no hotel rooms to be had in the Crescent City.

We pulled into Meridian, Mississippi and found ourselves a Drury Inn there where we could also watch the festivities in New Orleans.  It was a quiet night in Meridian, at least on the roads.  When we first checked in at the Drury, one fan was carrying in a twelve-pack of beer and yelled, "Roll Tide!" in the lobby.  Several other people echoed back the call.

It was billed as the game of the century and it might have been.  Except that #1 ranked LSU never showed up.  'Bama did, in fact, roll.  To a 21-0 victory and an undisputed national championship.  That 21 points is not what you might expect.  It was achieved with five field goals followed by a touchdown and missed extra point.  LSU never crossed mid-field until 8 minutes were left in the game.


The next morning, as we continued on to New Orleans along I-59, cars were streaming north from New Orleans toward Tuscaloosa and Birmingham.  Many had two, four or even six crimson flags mounted on top like the one below.

Tupelo, Mississippi. Birthplace of Elvis

U.S. highway 78 runs from Memphis to Birmingham.  Not quite halfway to Birmingham lies the town of Tupelo, Mississippi, with a population of about 35,000.  Tupelo took on a significance beyond its size in 1935 when Vernon and Gladys Presley became the parents of Elvis Presley.


Naturally, there is a tourist museum dedicated to "the king."  While it certainly isn't as significant as Graceland, it preserves the small two room Presley home and the Pentacostal church where Elvis attended services with his parents and picked up the gospel influence in his music.


This is one of the stops on the Mississippi Blues Trail.  Mississippi has recently worked pretty hard at noting many of the significant blues-related sites in the state.  This article from the U.K. Independent notes a few of them.  Interestingly, there is a free Blues Trail App for your iPhone or iPad to help locate the sites.  If you are passing through Mississippi, be sure to download it.


We also found a good barbeque restaurant in Tupelo.  It's located downtown close to the Bus Depot and has quite a bit of Presley related posters and clippings hanging on the walls.

Return to Beauvoir

When I first retired in January of 2003, we drove south and discovered the charm of the Gulf coast in Mississippi and Alabama. We though about buying a place in the area but opted instead for a purchase in Egypt. Two hurricanes and an oil spill versus one revolution. Well, every area has its pluses and minuses.

We returned to some of our favorite areas on the Gulf, Sunday to see what they look like now. One of the most beautiful areas in 2003 was a ten or twenty mile stretch of historic homes between Pass Christian and Gulfport, Mississippi. This status report from 2008 describes the situation in Pass Christian following Hurricane Katrina in August of 2005:

A Federal Emergency Management Agency accounting later found that of 2,300 homes, only 200 survived, including most of the old homes on East Scenic Drive.

"We lost 100 percent of our businesses, " Mayor Chipper McDermott said. "Every public building was damaged or destroyed. Every church. Every school. We were damn near annihilated."

...Teacher Ella DeDeaux, who recently moved back into her home, said her insurance premium is about $5,000 per year. She used to pay about $1,500.

Town librarian Sally James' total jumped from $1,500 to $6,000.

For obvious reasons, there are many "Lot For Sale" signs along the scenic drive. We were surprised at how many of the sturdy oak trees had survived. Brick houses on high ground had survived or been restored, otherwise the homesites are mostly vacant.

We stopped by Beauvoir, site of Jefferson Davis' home and Presidential Library that we had visited back in 2004.

Here are a couple of photos from 2004. First, this was the home, named Beauvoir.


This is the writing pavilion where Davis wrote his memoirs.


And finally, here is the presidential library.


This FEMA photograph shows the extent of the damage to the home.


This screen capture from the Beauvoir Website shows the extent of damage to the Writing Pavilion. It was completely destroyed except for the brick stairs.


The library lost almost all of the exhibits located on the first floor.

When we visited the site this week, the home and writing pavilion had been restored.


A few things to note. The large tree in front of the home that survived. The stairs on the writing pavilion are no longer made of brick. The writing pavilion now has a chimney matching the home.

The Presidential Library has a long way to go before being finished.


In many ways, the area actually looks more attractive than before the hurricane. The white sandy beaches are very inviting. People were enjoying them as they finished watching an afternoon Mardi Gras parade in Gulfport. The removal of numerous casinos and businesses from the Gulf side of the highway makes the whole waterfront much more inviting. The economy must still be devastated, however.

Jackson, Mississippi

If you looked at the previous post, you might have noticed rain clouds building in the sky. It started to rain as we left Baton Rouge and headed toward Jackson, Mississippi. We had been watching the forecasts and expected that the next day, Saturday, would be a rain day. Friday night turned out to be a very rainy night, too. We got as far as McComb, Mississippi, mostly via smaller roads in Louisiana to avoid more of that New Orleans bound traffic.

During a break in the weather on Saturday, we backtracked to the border and visited the Welcome Center for Mississippi. There we encountered the first person at one of these centers who was not helpful. She told us "There really isn't anything worthwhile to see between here and Jackson." As experienced travelers, we knew that had to be wrong. Fortunately, the Welcome Center had plenty of literature.

We were traveling Interstate 55 and got off at Magnolia, just a few miles north of the Welcome Center. There are a set of 1930's WPA murals in the post office there.


And there are a large number of well preserved, old Southern homes. They are nicely marked to fit with a driving tour brochure. A few even qualify as antebellum. (For those of you in the North, the "bellum" in question was "The War Between the States, 1861-65.")


McComb, by the way, played a significant role in the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. It also has an historic railway museum and was home to Bo Diddly.

We waited until late in the afternoon when the rain was forecast to stop before heading up to Jackson. Jackson has two capitols, the old and the new.

The old capitol was our first stop. I took this picture while standing in the middle of the street.


Let's just say that Jackson, Mississippi is a quiet town on Saturday afternoon. Here is a picture of Congress Street facing away from the current capitol.


We did, of course get a picture of the current capitol, too. Linda is in this one.


With that accomplished, we looked for a restaurant for dinner. The restaurant scene is about as dead as the traffic on Saturday. While driving around, we found this museum exhibit that surprised us.


Here is an article about Jackson's Muslim Museum in Saudi Aramco Magazine. Who knew?

Finally, we drove past this cafe.


It turns out that the Mayflower Cafe has been serving great seafood since 1935 and is considered a Jackson institution. Yahoo Travel reviewers mostly give it 4 or 5 stars. We were among the first to arrive for dinner. We had a great meal starting out with this crabmeat and eggplant appetizer.


The whole dinner was very good.

Just one bit of advice. The route to the restrooms takes you outside, down the block and up a long steep stairway. And, O yes, this is a BYOB place.