Yes, there is a Fitler,
Mississippi
We Found it...
Greenville &
Fitler, MS
1993
Photo left: Rose and Diane in Rio de Janerio, c 1985
Rose Villard and I traveled through about 25 states and
three continents, I talked with her in person or by phone
every day for 15 years and picked her up for church on
Sunday morning for at least 10 of those years. And as my
best and dearest friend, Rose became my partner in
many, many adventures. One of those adventures took
place when we took a six week trek across the Great
Lakes to Itasca, Minnesota, the source of the Mississippi River then down along the river
following blue roads as the river grew bigger and wider. We listened to Mark Twain’s books
until we got to Hannibal, Missouri, and then listened to Patti LaBelle until Memphis. We both
cried at the Martin Luther King Jr. memorial. Then we headed south along the Mississippi to
Greenville. We had already been on the road for two and a half weeks, but this adventure was
detouring to search for Rose’s family roots.
Both of us had read John M. Barry’s book, Rising Tide, about the 1927
Mississippi River flood. The descriptions of how the slaves and former
slaves were treated by the patrician Percy family, guardians of white
interests in the cotton empire in the Mississippi delta were riveting,
even more so when Rose claimed that her mother, Nona B. Johnson
Jenkins, had been on that levee as the waters rose to cover all the
lowlands of seven counties. The problem was that Nona never talked
about those times in detail. We were going to have to piece together a
more comprehensive picture of the Johnson family during
Reconstruction. The book concluded that the 1927 flood that did such
damage to the region, in fact changed the entire social structure of
black and white Mississippians in the delta. Hundreds of thousands of blacks left the cotton
fields and headed north to take factory jobs in Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland and Gary, Indiana.
Among them were Nona B. Johnson Jenkins, her six kids and all her brothers except for Seth
who stayed in Heathman up in Sunflower County. But the entire Johnson clan left Fitler,
Mississippi. By 1935 they were all gone. And Rose had lots of questions about what happened
to her family. She believed they had been driven off Big Poppa Johnson’s land and the Ku Klux
Klan just took it. I was looking for evidence that Ed Johnson in fact owned land at Fitler and
when and where he lost it and what he did next. Rose was told all the black folks records had
been burned in the courthouse. I was convinced from my work in the Kentucky Ohio River
counties, that land and tax records generally were kept intact however many other documents
were lost, stolen or strayed.
From John Barry’s book we learned that in 1927 the Delta black folk had encountered a new
form of economic slavery, share-cropping, and from a social perspective not much had changed
since the Civil War. Ten percent of the population (white) controlled 90 percent of the
population (black), and nowhere did this distinction show more clearly than 1927 as the
Mississippi River rose and rose and rose into the flood of the millennium. The narrative
described how the delta blacks were forced to keep building the levee higher as the waters
rose; then when the white folk of the Greenville area were taken off the levee by steamboats,
the blacks were held at gunpoint to keep them
from following. As Rose narrated some of the tales
she had garnered from various aunts and uncles,
she declared that she really needed to know what
happened in Mississippi that was so bad that her
mother picked up six kids and moved to Chicago
without money or friends there to help them.
The grinding poverty in the big city of Chicago took
its toll as Nona Jenkins worked cleaning houses
Blacks forced to build the levees higher.
and babysitting children of working mothers in
order to support her children -- “too proud to take charity,” had worked on Rose’s psych. “Why
did Daddy abandon us? How did Big Poppa lose his land to the Ku Klux Klan? What happened to
the large Johnson family? They had scattered all across the country.
Tracing Rose’s Roots
Rose had accompanied me in several journeys as I tried to search out the history of my family,
so she asked me to go with her to Mississippi to track down her family. Over several years I had
met Uncle James, Nona’s brother, and Aunt Bea in Trenton, Seth’s daughter, and of course, I’d
talked with Nona, but we really needed to go down to the archives of Issaquena and Sunflower
Counties and stand on the levee at Greenville to find Rose’s family history. So we left
Schnecksville and New Tripoli Pennsylvania and headed to find Fitler, Mississippi, taking a 4,500
mile odyssey to find some answers.
The very first thing we discovered as we drove south from Memphis, Tennessee, to Greenville,
Mississippi was that a large portion of the cotton fields had given way to enormous catfish
farms, the new cash crop of the upper delta. Secondly, cotton must be the ugliest plant ever
cultivated. Until the white puffs come out, the plants are just plain UGLY and for those of us
raised in orchard and corn and wheat and sorghum and pineapple and avocado regions, most of
the Mississippi delta is even ugly with the cotton balls in full bloom. Thirdly, as you get off the
main highways, most of the back country of the Mississippi delta is poverty stricken to the ‘enth
degree. So much for our Mississippi travelogue, I don’t think they will ask us to write one. Some
of the people we met were right nice; others were scary. But we finally found Fitler.
Off the Beaten Pathway –
At a store like the one on the left….
I wanted to stop for directions, but Rose
took one look at the situation “Don’t
stop, don’t look, they’re going to eat us,”
she said.
But that’s what Rose always said when
we got into “iffy” situations. Watched too
many scary movies is what I think.
Country stores were still operating at the four corners
off the main roads in 1993. Photo from online
sources.
They were playing dominoes inside the
store and they gave directions.
Historical Issaquena County,
Mississippi, and the Fitler Plantation
Before we left Pennsylvania, we had several oral
vignettes of Fitler, Mississippi, the home place for
the Johnson-Jenkins-Bradley-Lee families.
-- Nona Bradley Johnson Jenkins told of going
fishing in the Mississippi and being very careful
about the cottonmouth moccasin snakes that were
prevalent.
-- James Johnson, her brother, told of living in a
large room upstairs of the cabin and his older
brothers nailing his shoes to the floor overnight. He
followed them one night down to the speakeasy on
the river and you had to cross over a narrow plank
way to get to the building where he could hear the music and laughter. Big Poppa, who had
become a Baptist minister, came after his sons that very night. James and the other brothers
ran across the plank so fast they fell into the Mississippi River. James, very wet made his way
back home without seeing
the dancing, the hooch, or
whatever else went on there.
-- Bea Johnson Moody,
Seth’s daughter, lived in
Trenton, New Jersey, so Rose
and I went down to see her
several times. She had been a
union organizer for the
Ladies Garment Workers
Union and had had tea with
Eleanor Roosevelt at Hyde
Park, New York. Aunt Bea
told of hiding under the
covers when Big Mamma (Charlotte Johnson) came for her visits to Seth Johnson’s house.
Apparently Big Mamma made the circuit of her children’s homes staying as long as three or four
weeks and sharing all the gossip of the family and neighbors. Bea used to pretend she was
asleep, but she listened whenever Big Mamma gossiped. (photo: Aunt Bea and Rose Villard at
New Tripoli, Pa)
Because Seth Johnson settled at Heathman, up in Sunflower County, Bea did not know too
many stories about Fitler. But she did know that both Big Mamma and Big Poppa were buried
at Heathman Cemetery. We got the rest of that story from Aunt Lillian in Greenville.
-- Rose Jenkins Villard, who had come down to Mississippi as a young woman looking for her
father, said that Joseph Jenkins worked on the Mississippi River, but she had no idea what he
actually did.
So we had a few isolated snapshots of the Johnson
clan, but not much else. We drove into the motel
and surprise, surprise, there was a big welcome sign
– Johnson Family Reunion. So Rose immediately
went down to mingle. “They weren’t all that
friendly,” she exclaimed when she came back up to
the room. “Wrong Johnsons, but I did get something
to eat. They had a buffet set up so I helped myself.”
“Was that before they noticed you didn’t belong to
their side of the family?” I asked.
The next day,
we headed out
to find Fitler and
the courthouse
records. Taking
back roads
proved very “iffy” because we soon saw water on
both sides of the raised roadway (path was more like it) and my Camry just fit, so no car better
be coming the other way. Finally we came out to a road that led to Fitler, but we really needed
the courthouse records, so we made our way to Mayersville, the third or fourth historical
center of Issaquena County. I then spent the next three hours going through tax and deed and
mortgage records. Ed Johnson was easy to find, but he didn’t own the land, he was deedleasing it from the Melskinner Brothers first in 1913 and a second time in 1916. The Melskinner
Brothers were paying the taxes on the property, so Ed Johnson was either leasing the land as a
share-cropper or he was purchasing the land over time and never paid it in full. The census
records find the Edward D. Johnson (Ed, Edd and Ed G.) in the 1900, 1910 and 1920 records of
Issaquena County near the Manny Plantation on Beat 2, located near Fitler, Mississippi. And I
double checked to see if any African Americans owned land and paid taxes on that land in
Issaquena County, and I found several men who owned, not leased. Unfortunately these
records said nothing about the KKK running Ed Johnson off his land in the 1920s. All the records
say was that in 1930, Ed and Charlotte Johnson were living on Moore Street in Greenville and
he was a porter in a retail grocery store. The 1930 census also showed Nona B. Jenkins and six
of her children living with her Mom and Dad.
“Rose, I said,” your Pennsylvania driver’s license doesn’t have the right birth date on it,” I
commented, “Here you are at age 3 in the Greenville census, You are five years older than your
driver’s license says.” She ignored me, of course.
Aunt Lillian’s Stories
The very next day we went over to Greenville to meet
Aunt Lillian Jordan, who was descended from Alice
Johnson, Seth’s daughter, and thus Aunt Bea was her
aunt and Nona Bradley Johnson Jenkins her great
aunt. Lillian was the last of the Johnson family left in
Greenville. She told family stories the same way Aunt
Bea did, very colorful and detailed. We started with Big
Mamma (Charlotte Johnson) and Big Poppa (Ed
Johnson). Apparently Big Poppa, Ed Johnson, after
leaving Fitler down in Issaquena County moved to
Greenville in 1930, then took a job as overseer at the
Greenbow & Beard Plantation in Bolivar County.
According to Lillian’s story, Ed Johnson rode a big white
horse and told all the workers what to do that day. In
spite of becoming a Baptist minister, Big Poppa Johnson
apparently placed his wife Charlotte Bradley Johnson at Priscilla,
Mississippi, some four or five miles south of his work at
Stringtown, and also he apparently raised another and separate
Johnson family up there. Big Mamma took to visiting her children
one at a time, staying for several weeks, and bringing all the family
and neighborhood gossip and then passing along new information
from her succession of visits.
When Charlotte Johnson died, her sons – Eddie, Seth, Marcus,
Benjamin, Eldridge (Uneide said to have died in the 1920s, Henry
was in Detroit, James was up north, and Qute in California and
Nona already in Chicago), made arrangements to bury their mother at the Mt. Zion Missionary
Baptist Church Cemetery at Heathman in Sunflower County. Two of the boys rode up to tell Big
Poppa Ed Johnson to come to the funeral. Apparently Ed objected because his boss had not yet
returned from Jackson, the state capitol, and as overseer he could not leave the plantation.
Whereupon his sons, man-handled Ed Johnson all the way to Heathman to the funeral. “They
got to fighting right there at the burying grounds,” explained Lillian, “Big Poppa and his sons. It
was quite something.” According to Rose, her uncles were quite willing to “perform” at any
family gathering especially if they had a touch of liquor in them. She remembered an incident at
Uncle Henry’s funeral at Detroit when James hung on top of the casket as they tried to move it
up the church aisle.
Lillian further said that her grandfather
Seth, had been among those black folk
in the refugee camp after the 1927
flood, and that times were very hard.
Her own father was Tell Jordan, but her
mother Alice Johnson Jordan married
again to Fred Clay, so she had a step
sister and step brother, Topsy Clay and
Freddie Levi Clay. The day that we
visited Greenville, Lillian’s
granddaughter was visiting from Arkansas where she lived and was going to school.
That afternoon we headed for Heathman
to the Mt. Zion Missionary Baptist
church cemetery where Charlotte
Bradley Johnson was buried. The stones
were scattered and a little random, so
Rose spent about an hour carefully
looking for her grandmother’s grave.
As evening approached, we drove along
the great levee south of Greenville
looking for a way to get up on top and
see the Mississippi River. A sign warned
us not to go up on the top of the levee
without a four-wheel vehicle, and our Camry didn’t seem to want to scale the heights. After all,
we had seen the Mississippi River for an entire week getting to Fitler.
The next morning we headed for Jackson, Mississippi, to the state archives to see what other
documentation we could find about Ed and Charlotte Johnson, but the archivist on duty that
day was less than helpful, in fact she was downright rude, so we left and headed to visit a friend
of ours in Vicksburg. Then we made a decision to forego the rest of the trip down the
Mississippi to New Orleans since we had both been there, and we headed inland up the
Natchez Trace.
Years later I learned that Issaquena County had been the center of the Choctaw native people’s
tribe and I recalled when our train stopped at Albuquerque New Mexico, the Native Americans
there all gave Rose free bead necklaces because they said she was Choctaw.
And More of the Story….
Not Cotton, Trees………………
We did not know it at the time, but Fitler,
Mississippi’s claim to fame was not the traditional
Delta cotton, but rather the largest stand of
cottonwood hardwood trees in the world. There
were many cotton plantations north of Fitler and in
the rest of Issaquena County but in the south part of
the county there was a huge hardwood forest.
Further investigation showed that Issaquena County, Mississippi, had the highest density of
slaves in the country at 92.6% black and 7.3% white with no Free Blacks registered. In 1860
there were 7,244 slaves, 39 slaveholders each held 77 slaves or more about 65% of the total,
the rest of the slaves in the county were held by 76 other slave owners. (Source: Tom Blake “Issaquena
County, Mississippi: Largest Slaveholders from 1860 Slave Census Schedules) That same census revealed a
substantial occupation – overseer—among the white population of Issaquena County. There
were no Free Blacks registered.
The hardwood trees were an important commodity in Antebellum and Reconstruction America,
because most of the trees in the Deep South were soft wood, OK for fences and shacks and
paper products, but not for buildings of any substance; therefore the plantations from Fitler
shipped timber to Vicksburg and New Orleans. That’s why Joe Jenkins always claimed to be a
boat-person from New Orleans. In 2014, I found a federal government study (“Historic Resources
Assessment of the Pascagoula River/Dela, Twin Oaks and Mahannah Farm Tracts, Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway Wildlife
that covered the Mahannah
(Manny Plantation) Wildlife Management Area. The study revealed that during the 1920s and
1930s several African American cottages were positioned back in the forest as a weak, isolated
Mitigation Project” completed for the U.S. Corps of Engineers, Mobile District)
community. The people disappeared and there are no traces of the cottages today. The 1913
and 1916 land leases for Big Poppa Johnson in Beat 2 Issaquena County near Manny Plantation
were almost certainly back in the edge of the forest between the hamlet of Fitler and what is
now the Mahannah W.M.A.
The second relevant document was the 1919 Fitler Plantation Deed wherein I. Lucas sold to
Annie E. Heath all his ownership of the Fitler Plantation including the counters and shelving,
post office fixtures and two desks and one chair situated in the storehouse on said land, known
as the “Red Store” with Annie Heath paying all the taxes for the year 1919. Total sale price was
$5,000. Almost certainly the Johnson-Jenkins part of
the family would have purchased goods at the Red
Store at Fitler, Mississippi. When Seth Johnson, age
25, filled out the World War I draft registration in
Issaquena County, he said that he was working for I.
Lucas at Fitler, Mississippi.
The Fitler Red Store during 1927 flood.
A third exciting document was the detailed map of
plantations of Issaquena County that was filed in the state archives in 1908. Examining further
documents and maps of the Issaquena County plantations, it appears that at least part of the
Lee and Johnson families lived in the cotton plantation area north of Tallula during slavery
The 1865 Freedmen’s Contracts for Issaquena County, Mississippi, the nearest possible
documents out of Slavery, showed a Ben Lee, age 57, and Mary Ann Lee, age 12 at the Oakly
plantation with S. M. Davis holding the work contract. Bin Johnson, 47, and Jim Johnson, 30,
were working at the Ellislu Plantation for Seth Stronghton. Seth also had a contract for a Big
Charlotte, age 22, working at Homochitto Plantation and a Charlotte, 14, at Duncansby
Plantation, and there were nine Jewish first names with no surnames at Ellislu, Homochitto, and
Oakly plantations. S. M. Davis also had Lucretia, Mary, Mily, Nat, and Peter Johnson under
contracts at Holly Ridge and Oakly plantations. These plantations were all adjacent to each
other along the MIssissippi in the northern section above Tallula. About half the names on the
contracts listing were first names only, and there were no Bradley surnames listed, however
where the Lees were located at least some of the Bradleys may have been as well.
Complicating the story is that Ed Johnson was born in 1872 in Alabama, not Mississippi. Since
there were already a number of Johnsons living in Issaquena County, this may be a case where
Mississippi slaves were auctioned to Alabama planters at the Vicksburg slave market and then
former slave families were being re-united immediately following the Civil War. Another
possibility is that the previous Alabama slave-owner lost his property during the war and let the
Lees and
Johnsons
before 1865
The Plantations of
Issaquena County,
Mississippi, filed at
Library of Congress,
Washington DC, in 1908
Fitler
Landing
and the
Red Store
The great
Cottonwood
forest, Ed
Johnson from
1913-1930
former slaves go or else moved to Mississippi bringing some former slaves with him. There are
probably a number of other possibilities including Ed’s father moving where jobs were
available.
More information about the large hardwood forest came from the 1993 study done for the U.S.
Army Corps of Engineers which apparently was used by the state of Mississippi in establishing
the 12,695 acre Mahannah Wildlife Management Area. The study shows a series of abandoned
river channels and one active channel coming through the forest. The WMA headquarters in
2014 stated that these geomorphic features are called the Cypress Bayou, a unique hardwood
and bottomland agricultural swamp, created by overflow from the Yazoo River entering the
Mississippi River just 15 miles north of Vicksburg.
1993 Map for U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
2014 Map for Mahannah Wildlife Management Area
Rose always wanted to complete her family history, not just for her own curiosity but also as a
legacy for her children and grandchildren. Unfortunately we only had part of the study done
when she died in 2008, so I have continued searching her family as well as mine from time to
time. But my travel is greatly restricted, and much of the needed information is down there in
Mississippi and Alabama. So we have left clues for the next generation to continue finding out
about the Johnson-Jenkins-Bradley-Lee families of Fitler, Issaquena County, Mississippi.
Love you, Rose.
Diane Perrine Coon`
Shelbyville, Kentucky
August 2014
Sources
Public Documents: Studies and Articles
Blaine, H. and Eugene Wilson, “Historic Resources Assessment of the Pascagoula river/Delta,
Twin Oaks and Mahannah Farm Tracts, Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway wildlife
Mitigation Project, Mississippi,” (Tuscaloosa, AL: 1993), prepared for U.S. Army Corps of
Engineers, Mobile District.
Blake, Tom, “Issaquena County, Mississippi: Largest Slaveholders from 1860 Slave Census
Schedules and Surname Matches for African Americans on 1870 Census,” on line access
through ancestry.com August 20014.
Bragg, Marian, “Historic Names and Places on the Lower Mississippi River,” (Vicksburg, MS:
1977), Mississippi River Commission, prepared for Department of the Army, U.S. Army
Corps of Engineers.
Issaquena Genealogy and History Project, “1865 Freedmen Contracts for Issaquena County,”
Bob Franks, copyright 2003, 2004., on line accessed August 2014.
………………………………………………………………..“Fitler Plantation Deed: 1919,” Bob Franks, copyright
2003, 2004., on line accessed August 2014.
………………………………………………………………..“Issaquena County Communities,” Bob Franks,
copyright 2003, 2004., on line accessed August 2014.
…………......................................................, “Issaquena County Geographical Landmarks,” Bob
Franks, copyright 2003, 2004., on line accessed August 2014.
Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries, and Parks, “Mahannah Wildlife Management Area
Map,” (Jackson, MS: 2014), online access August 7, 2014.
……… “Mahannah,” home page for Mahannah WMA, on line access August 7, 2014.
Mississippi Genealogy and History Network, “Issaquena County MSGHN,” on line access August
2014.
…………………………………………………………………., “Sunflower County MSGHN,” on line access August
2014.
Schneider, Betty Aron, “Sunflower County, MS: Mt Zion Cemetery Black burials, Heathman,”
(Jackson, MS: Mississippi GenWeb, 2008), transcriptions by Bernice White and Sharon
Grissette, on line access July 2014)
Turnage, Lawanda, “Mississippi Trivia,” (Jackson, MS: Mississippi Tourism Division, 1997), on
line access August 2014.
Wikipedia, “Issaquena County, Mississippi,” on line access July 2014.
Public Documents: Census, Birth, Death, Draft Certificates
Federal Manuscript Census:
Boliver County, Mississippi, Beat 3, Mount Bayou Town: 1910
Green County, Alabama, Mountua 9 Precinct: 1930
Issaquena County, Mississippi, Beat 2, Beat 5: 1850, 1860, 1870, 1880, 1900, 1910, 1920, 1930,
1940
Issaquena County, Mississippi Slave Schedules: 1850, 1860
Sharkey County, Mississippi: Beat 1: 1920
Sunflower County, Mississippi: Beat 3, Indianola, Heathman: 1910, 1920, 1930, 1940
Washington County, Mississippi: Greenville: 1900, 1940
Government Certificates:
Arkansas, County Marriage Index, 1837-1957 – Louis Jordan and Alice Johnson, 1931, on line
access through ancestry.com August 2014.
Greenville, Mississippi City Directory: 1940 page 315, on line access through ancestry.com
August 2014.
World War I Draft Registration – Seth Johnson, Issaquena County, MS, July 1917, access through
ancestry.com August 2014.
Online Photos and Media
Crosby Lumber Company, Genealogy and History of Issaquena County, Mississippi, on line
photos, accessed August 2014., google images.
Issaquena Genealogy and History Project, “Rand McNally World Atlas, Mississippi, 1897,” Bob
Franks, copyright 2003, 2004, originals in Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs
Division, on line accessed August 2014.
………….”Contemporary Issaquena County Map,” Bob Franks, copyright 2003, 2004, originals in
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, on line accessed August 2014.
McFarland, A. “Map of Plantations of Carrol Parish, Louisiana, and Issaquena County,
Mississippi, (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress Map Division, 1908), on line access
August 2014.
Williamsburg Photos, “Overseer on a White Horse,” on line access August 2014, google images.
Published Works
Barry, John M., Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America,
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997).