Tennessee - Day 25 - Delta Heritage/Brownsville

Chickasaw State Park
Monday, 25 November 2019

Before I left the campground this morning I saw 2 more birds I like. 

I saw a small woodpecker in the trees - either a Downy or a Hairy Woodpecker - only a few inches difference in their sizes and I didn't get a good enough look to be sure.

frost = chilliness

And when we stopped at the Visitor Center again so I could walk the dogs, I saw several Bluebirds.  So very pretty.  I've never lived anywhere where I could see them and never get tired of their beautiful color.

Last night's temp was predicted to be below freezing, though it didn't seem that cold to me this morning.  But at the Visitor Center I saw that it was, in fact, fairly chilly.

today's route

I heard on the radio of 4 accidents on Memphis roads for folks to avoid.  I thought about staying awhile at the Visitor Center to let the traffic clear, but I knew it'd take time to get from here to the highways so went on ahead.  Memphis traffic, even on a Monday and on a ring road, was pretty heavy, but I was lucky and didn't get caught in accident-type traffic.

Not far out of the urban area, I passed the turn-off for the town of LaGrange, TN.  Since I was headed for Brownsville, TN, I found myself a little disoriented.  Which state was I in - TN or TX?

The main Tennessee NPR station broadcasts classical music daily from 9 AM to 4 PM.  But because I was so far south today, I picked up a Mississippi NPR station that had primarily news programs.  Except for a Thanksgiving cooking program they aired today that told us Craig Claiborne was a native of Sunflower, MS, and gave us a recipe for glaze for a roast or other meat: apple jam, horseradish, dry mustard, cracked black pepper.  Especially if you're smoking the meat over applewood.

I passed something labeled PictSweet Plant, which sounded like a familiar brand.  When I looked it up, though, I didn't recognize it.  But I learned it's a four-generation, family-owned, family-run company that produces frozen veggies grown on their own farms.  Their slogan: Nature gets it right, we just get it ready.

Coming into the Brownsville area I passed an enormous John Deere dealership with what looked like an acre or two of huge farm equipment.

Which figures because all through this area I passed cotton fields, most with cotton still growing in them.  I also saw huge fields of that same green plant I've seen before - maybe winter wheat?  I've read it's hardy enough to be grown in every county in the state.

I passed a branch of the TN College of Applied Technology.  I've seen multiple branches of this school all over the state.

Brownsville
The main reason I wanted to come here is that it's the county seat of Haywood County, which prior to the Civil War had the most slaves of any other TN county, and enslaved people were the majority of the county's residents.  Even today it's got 60% black and 36% white residents.  The vast amount of fields planted in cotton still today explains this, I'm sure.  I just wanted to see such a place.

It's a small town of about 10,000 residents, built near the Hatchie River which was once important for shipping the local cotton crop.

I read somewhere that Tripp Country Hams are a treat not generally known to the tourism industry but not to be missed.  So I stopped.  City girl that I am, I was surprised to learn that they don't usually produce pre-cooked ham, and that anything I bought would have to be cooked before I could stick it on a sandwich.  I also learned that, so close to Thanksgiving, they'd sold out of their small hams, which anyway I'd need an oven to cook.  Instead I bought what they call "biscuit slices," which look like sandwich meat.  I'll report on the flavor when I cook it.  The lady that works there told me she cooks those slices covered over very low heat and turns them often and says they won't get dried out that way.  But I'm not trying it sitting in downtown Brownsville.

West Tennessee Delta Heritage Center
This museum is the other reason I came to Brownsville.  I'd heard they have a museum about rural TN music and I was curious.  Turns out they have much more than that.

The fairly small building has been divided into 3 rooms, each called a museum.  They have the West TN Cotton Museum, the Hatchie River Museum, and the West TN Music Museum.  Near the main building sits what was once a 1-room schoolhouse where Tina Turner went to school, back when she was Anna Mae Bullock and lived in Nutbush, TN.  And next to that is the last home of "Sleepy" John Estes, blues legend.  Those 2 buildings were moved to this spot.  For all this, they ask only donations.

Each of these rooms had a lot of information in it, most of it new to me.  So maybe the best way for me to show this is through the photos I took.

West Tennessee Cotton Museum

basket used for picking cotton

made in the late 1800s

sack used for picking cotton

close-up of sign with sack (left)

I never realized many people used baskets to carry the cotton they picked, but they did.

I've seen photos of people using sacks to pick cotton, carried by a strap across their heads.  Somehow that never seemed real until today, looking at one of those sacks from 1953.  But the sign, above right, says the sack was a 20th-century development.  Previously, pickers used baskets.

There were several types of plows used for different chores.  The one below left - called a middlebuster plow - was used after a different kind broke the soil; this one prepared it for planting.  It was still used long after tractors had been developed, probably because it was affordable and still worked just fine.

plow used 1850s-1940s

I can't tell from the photo when it was taken

traditional jute wrapping for a cotton bale

plastic used now

Once the cotton's picked, it's weighed including seeds and stems.

scales apparatus

There's some duplication of info between the sign at left and the one below, but there's a lot of new information in each that I thought was interesting.

There's more interesting info on the invention of the cotton gin (cotton engine - get it?) at this link.   https://aaregistry.org/cotton-gin-patented

I remember when people would ask my daddy, who grew up on a small cotton farm, how he was doing, he'd often say, "Fair to middling."  I never knew until now that "middling" is an actual thing (see Grade #2 at left), and it means pretty good.  Daddy would have known, but it's one of the many things I never asked him.

sample of graded cotton

There's a lot more information in this cotton museum, but I'll move on to the ecology one.








Hatchie River Museum
This is the river that flows just south of town, and the ecology of it would be really important to local residents.  Parts of it were interesting for tourists, too.

3 freshwater aquariums (aquarii?) stretch across this wall

I've never seen an Alligator Snapping Turtle, and this is as close as I ever want to come to one.  Looks prehistorically fearsome.

This room had a lot of information about the Hatchie River, the plants and critters that depend on it, and recent troubles with its ecology.

West Tennessee Delta Music Museum
One whole wall had an overview of this music.

Panel #1

Panel #2

Panel #3

Panel #4

Panel #5

The museum mostly limited itself to musicians and songwriters who actually lived in this area, and there were far more than I've documented here.  I'll just put this info in and let you choose who you're interested in.  Among the musicians there were the wildly famous ones.

Tina Turner

Elvis Presley

And then there were the ordinarily famous or those well-known as blues artists.

Carl Perkins

Luther Ingram

Big Maybelle

Hank Williams, Jr.

Sleepy John Estes

Alex Harvey

Eddy Arnold

And these were all folks who lived in this one area.  Clearly fertile musical ground.

Of course there was a lot more information here - costumes of performers and various memorabilia of theirs - all kinds of things.  This museum alone was absolutely worth the stop.

I didn't go to the separate buildings for Tina Turner and Sleepy John Estes, but I'm sure for their fans they, too, were worth the visit.

Back on the road
As I drove south, I passed more cotton fields, still full of cotton.  They seem to have a long growing season here.

I was passed by a pink Cadillac.  Someone must have sold a lot of Mary Kay products around here.

I passed 2 cotton gins - the Zion Gin Co. near Brownsville and, farther south, the Union Gin Co. (est. 1913, per their sign).  Which I guess shows how much cotton is grown in this area if they can support 2 separate gin companies.

For a while I was back on the First State Road again.

I passed an incredibly huge array of solar panels.  I saw them from a distance (the land is getting a little flatter) and thought they were a body of water.  Nope.  Solar panels.  Acres of them.

I saw another Marsh Hawk, aka Northern Harrier.  An adult, this time.