Gossip Columns.
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Maggie the Cat, Amanda Wingfield, Blanche DuBois and her sister Stella—electrifying women characters whose words and personas will resonate forever in American theatre. The playwright who created these female icons knew something about remarkable women, having grown up in a place where the nation’s first state-supported university for women was established and where a group of dedicated ladies paid their respects to the departed with such grace and dignity their ritual became a national holiday.
The truth is, around here you won’t find many tin roofs where a real cat can land, although there are plenty of roofs that Southern belles like Maggie or Amanda could have called home. Mansards, A-lines, slates and shakes sitting atop well-turned columns and pediments, welcoming porticoes and charming front porches. These are the elements of style in the Black Prairie region that once hosted the capital of Confederate Mississippi and that today boasts not only rich history of all kinds, including African American, but also the sort of come-hither beauty that keeps visitors talking long after they’ve gone.
Earth, wind and water were the first elements to shape the Black Prairie region of the Mississippi Hills.
Black Prairie soil, chalky and calcium-rich, heaped with alluvial deposits, could grow just about anything, especially cotton.
It was the
Tombigbee River that first brought those alluvial deposits, as later it would bring the steamboats that could carry the cotton down to
Mobile to be shipped to northern markets.
Rail lines came as well; fortunes were made.
Soon, fine European furnishings were being shipped in on the steamboats to decorate the planters’ homes.
But first the ownership had to be relinquished for some of the other residences already in the area.
One was a 2-story, 4-room log home in Moshulaville, near
Macon.
The home belonged to Choctaw District Chief Moshulatubbee, who lived there with his two wives and many children.
Although he was reportedly opposed to it, Moshulatubbee signed the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, which authorized the final removal of Choctaws from the area, swapping 11 million acres of their
Mississippi lands for 15 million acres in the
Oklahoma territory.
While Greenwood Leflore, the leader who had actively promoted the treaty, stayed behind in Mississippi on plantation lands he had negotiated for himself, Moshulatubbee sold his home for $100 and made the trek west with the majority of his tribe.
Later when the
Mississippi state government found itself dispossessed after Union soldiers torched the state capitol and most of the rest of Jackson, the government re-established itself here in
Macon in the facilities of the Calhoun Institute, a private school for girls.
Today, several self-guided driving tours are available to help you wind your way through the Noxubee County Historical Trail, and at the
Noxubee County Historical Society Museum, you can delve into the area’s Choctaw history and explore an early post office.
Macon also offers a parade of beautiful antebellum residences, each with its own story and style.
But after you’ve satisfied your architectural yen, be sure to head out to
Noxubee National Wildlife Refuge for a real bird’s-eye view of home.
Through the use of innovative “insert nesting boxes,” the Refuge’s nationally-acclaimed management program is now helping to save the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker from extinction.
From the Refuge, head north where the nests get larger and finer, but where a playwright once lived whose most famous character faced a situation very much like that of the Refuge’s residents:
a delicate and endangered bird, she too depended on the kindness of strangers.