Car Dealerships! New and Used ...

From the Lincoln, Lawrence, Franklin Library's Online Collection. 

A Convoy of Touring Cars Roughly 100 Years Ago

From the C.W. Witbeck Collection, MDAH. 

To my eye, the cars above are similar to the cars parked in front of the "new" City Hall in a linen postcard from circa 1910 (see photo left).  I am wondering if they were taken by the same photographer.  In the background of the featured black and white photo is the Inez Hotel, built in 1904.  It is an angle of the hotel that is not often seen in photos.  In the distance, past the gabled roof and to the left of the conical tree, is what I believe to be the upper floor of the old East's Pharmacy building, one of the town's only pre-Civil War brick buildings, which burned to the ground in the not-too-distant past.  

The old postcard to the left, which has been associated with the Eben Bee family, is, as with the one above, a part of the Cooper Postcard Collection at MDAH.  

What do these three old photos prove?  That "going riding" has been a pastime of Brookhavenites for more than 100 years! 

Down by the Old Mill Stream ...

Ole Brook Mill. From the LLF Online John Holly Williams "Old School" Collection.  Date Unclear, but compared to the photo below, this photo is likely to be much earlier than 1903 as noted in the handwritten note below...

What is known: the mill was constructed sometime after the Jaynes arrived in the area in 1818.   

And Oldie But a Goodie

From the Daily Leader's 1976 Bicentennial Edition, from the Mary Becker Hatcher archives, via her daughter Bettie Hatcher Cox, and scanned in by Deenie Tallant.

Note the brick structure to the right is a glimpse of the back side of the old firehouse/library and City Hall, which is now the home to the Chamber of Commerce.

And now for a mystery:  The house/business that stands at this address, as best I can tell, is quite similar, but does not appear to be the same building shown in this photo. (Trees obscure today's Google Street View of the house.) Does anyone know the fate of this house in the picture and/or the history of the structure that stands there now if it is NOT one in the same? 

Please leave a comment here or one on my Facebook page.  Thanks!

UPDATE: The consensus is that this has has been torn down and the lot now serves as a parking lot for a house/business to the west. While that structure is similar, information as to how old it is and its history is, as they say, a story for another day. 

Southern Wholesale Co. -- A Building and Business Live On

From the Don Jackson Collection at the LLF Library.  No Date.

This business, on East Court Street at N. Railroad Avenue, lives on as McLane Southern.  For more information on that operation, see this link.

For those of you who don't care to click on the link, here is the first paragraph from the McLane site: 

"McLane Southern was formed in 1986 when McLane merged with Southern Wholesale in Brookhaven, Mississippi.  Since that time, it has grown to a 350,000 square foot grocery distribution center located on 20-plus acres and employing approximately 500 teammates.

"This division now has annual sales of over 1 billion dollars to more than 1,900 customers in a five-state area, which includes all of Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas, along with parts of Tennessee and Missouri." (Emphasis mine.)

This building is now part of Brookhaven Outreach Ministries.  It received a much appreciated paint job earlier this year.  For more on that and other information regarding the location and the people who are keeping it humming, please see this link to a story in the Daily Leader. 

Magnolias Galore!

From the C.W. Witbeck collection at MDAH.  A magnification of the original reveals this young lady to be Lynda Hedgepeth Murray.

Wouldn't you love to know the story of how this float came to be?  Surely they didn't decorate it in Brookhaven and drive it all the way up Highway 51 to Jackson! 

Feed and Seed

From the Lincoln, Lawrence, Franklin Library Online Collection.