A Family Outing, 100 years Ago
Biloxi-Gulfport Daily Herald, 14 Jun 1921, p8:
“PARTY ENJOYS FISH FRY: A small party from Big Level enjoyed an outing on Red Creek last Wednesday near the City Bridge. The chief sport was fishing until a nice lot was caught, after which they were cooked and eaten. Then those who cared for that kind of sport took advantage of the nice warm water of Red Creek by going in bathing. Not each member of the party succeeded in capturing a fish, but the number of fish caught exceeded by far the number of anglers, a fact for which all of the party felt thankful immediately after grace was said. Those making up the party were: Mr. and Mrs. D. A. Lott, Mr. and Mrs. J. A. Lott. Mr. and Mrs. B. A. Lott and children, Mr. and Mrs. H. P. Breland, Mr. and Mrs. J. J. Bond and Misses Pearl and Zena Bond, and Elva Lott.”
This little item appeared in the Big Level News column of the Daily Herald newspaper exactly one hundred years ago last week. It was written by Crab Breland, my great-great uncle and a long-time Herald correspondent, about an outing enjoyed by his Lott nieces and nephews. What thrilled me so when I saw it is that these are also my people—my grandparents and some of their siblings and niblings who are my great aunts and uncles and cousins. Pardon me while I introduce them.
Mr. and Mrs. D.A. Lott: my grandparents, Dolphus Absalom Lott and Mary Lou Hinton Lott. At the time of this outing, he was 24 years old and she was 21, as both had just had birthdays in May. They were young newlyweds, having married on Christmas Eve five months previously. They were living in the house his father built, on the Big Level land his father homesteaded in the 1880s. Both of Dolph’s parents had already died—his dad in 1904 and his mother, Crab’s sister, in 1916.
Mr. and Mrs. J.A. Lott: Granddaddy’s oldest brother and sister-in-law, John Albert Lott and his wife Agnes Bond Lott. At 46, they were the senior members of this party. After John died in 1935, Agnes moved in with Dolph and Mary Lou for the last few years of her own life—she died in 1942. My younger brother, John, is named for this great-uncle.
Mr. and Mrs. B.A. Lott and children: This is another of Dolph’s brothers, Bruner Lott, 30, and his wife Florence Whittington Lott, 28, and their two young children, Claude C. Lott, 4, and Esta Lee Lott, 2. Uncle Bruner and Aunt Florence both lived until the mid-1960s, so I had a chance to know them. Their house and farm were near Granddaddy’s on the old Lott homestead, where Oil Well Road intersects with Big Four Road. Their two children were first cousins and childhood playmates to my dad and his siblings. Their son Claude later built a house nearby and Claude’s son, Thomas, was a schoolmate and sometime playmate for Keith and me and Uncle ’Nell’s boys. Thomas still lives there on his dad’s place.
Mr. and Mrs. H.P. Breland: This is Dolph’s sister, Minnie, and her husband, Harris Percell Breland. They were both 26 at this time and had also been married a short time, less than two years. They were still childless, as their only child, William Odell, would not be born for six more years. I knew Aunt Minnie and Uncle Percell well while I was growing up. We visited their house and farm fairly often, particularly when Odell, a career military man, and his family would come home. Odell’s son, Bill, is my age and we delighted in playing with each other as kids. Bill and I roomed together during our sophomore year in college and he was a groomsman in my wedding.
Mr. and Mrs. J. J. Bond and Misses Pearl and Zena Bond: This is another sister and brother-in-law to my granddaddy. Jeremiah (Jerry) Johnson Bond, 47, and Matilda Elizabeth Lott Bond, 42, and their two daughters, Leola Pearl, 18; Zena, 12. Great-aunt Matilda died not long after this outing in 1925 and Great-uncle Jerry died in 1950. They lived, and are buried, on the old homestead belonging to my great-great-grandfather, Absalom Nathan Lott. That family cemetery, now called the Jerry Bond-Lott Cemetery, is located just a couple of miles from my boyhood home in upper Big Level; it is where my interest in genealogy was first sparked. “Aunt” Zena (really my first cousin once removed) is the only one in this family that I knew as I grew up, but she was a favorite. She and her husband, Minos Brooks, lived in Wiggins, behind the pickle factory, and were across-the-street-neighbors to my parents during their first five years of marriage. They stayed close even after my parents moved to Big Level. I recall fondly the times I got to spend the night with Aunt Zena and Uncle Miney.
Elva Lott: One of Granddaddy’s older sisters, Elva was 40 at the time of this outing and well on her way to being an old maid. However, two and a half years later, she surprised everyone in the family when she married the 46-year-old bachelor, William Wesley. Aunt Elva died in 1950 before I was born.
Indulge me a bit more and let me turn the remaining focus of this piece onto my grandma. Mary Lou Hinton was born in 1900 to a large family in the Oak Grove community of Perry County, just a dozen miles or so north from Big Level. She was the middle child of nine children, and the middle sister of five girls, born to William Thomas Lazarus Jackson Hinton and Theodocia Dorthea Mixon Hinton. (This great-grandfather is the only person in my ancestry files with four given names. I can imagine his mother calling him out: “William Thomas Lazarus Jackson Hinton! You just wait ’til your father gets home!”)
This picture from January 1956 is one of the most prized in my photo collection. That’s my two-year-old self sitting in Grandma Lott’s lap with Keith and Judy, my two older siblings on her right. Granddaddy is holding Mike and Jerry (two of Uncle ’Nell and Aunt Reicey’s sons) and Wallace (their oldest) is kneeling in the shadows behind me in the photo’s center.
Mary Lou, as she was called, was a country farm girl, having all the farm and farmhouse skills expected of a piney woods girl of that era, including a few you just don’t see anymore. My earliest distinct memory of her is being out in the back yard at her and Granddaddy’s house watching as she wrung the necks of two chickens simultaneously. Picture it: She’s just returned from the henhouse with a chicken in each hand. Holding these two birds by their heads she begins to twirl them around—the one in her right hand spins clockwise and the other counterclockwise. After three or four rapid turns, she whips her wrists, the chickens’ necks pop, and the headless creatures go flying into the yard. Now the two of them go running helter-skelter like… well, exactly like chickens with their heads cut off. Nope, there’s not much call for that skill these days. But I digress.
As far as I know, as a youngster, Mary Lou seldom had the opportunity to venture much beyond the farm, church, and school. I’m sure there were occasional trips to New Augusta and to the “big meetings” that were held at other churches in the area. It may have been at such an extended revival meeting down at Paramount in Big Level where she would first meet the Lott family that she would later marry into.
I don’t know the names, or how many, of the small schools Mary Lou may have attended during her childhood, but I do know that she graduated high school from the Oak Grove School in the southern portion of Perry County in April 4 of 1920 and that she aspired to a teaching career. I have in my files a photocopy of her graduation speech, in her own handwriting, in which she "predicts" the future successes of some of her classmates as "reported" in the "Apr. 4, 1930" edition of the "Oak Grove Advertiser" newspaper. In this speech she claims that this newspaper from a decade in the future had mysteriously fallen from the air into her lap on graduation day. In addition to herself, the article purports to name several of her classmates and their occupations and doings ten years out. It states that "Mary Lou Hinton has just returned on the train to Chicago to resume her work as superintendent of one of the primary schools there."
Wow! Grandma wanted to be a school teacher! Who knew? Did she really have those dreams or was that just some grandiose thing she concocted for her speech. If it was real it was short-lived, as her marriage to Dolph Lott on Christmas Eve later that year ended those career plans.
And then five and a half short months hence she’s on this outing at Red Creek enjoying getting to know her new family and them getting to know her, living the country farmwife life that I grew up knowing to be her destiny. Thinking of these things—this extended-family swim and fish fry of 100 years ago and of the similar outings that I enjoyed at this very location back in the 1950s and ’60s and later with my wife and daughters—fills me with an immense sense of wonder and of pleasure and of familial connection and closeness and of other emotions that I’m having trouble articulating just now.
That’s me back in my mid-thirties with my two daughters, Laura Beth and Leigh Ann. and my nephew, Matt (John’s son) enjoying the warm water and white sandbars of Red Creek on a June outing to the City Bridge in 1993. It’s high time we got back down there!
Oh, there’s one more part to this story. On the day of that one-hundred-year-ago outing, Grandma, barely 21 years old, was 6 weeks pregnant with her first child, Burnell. I wonder if she even knew she was expecting? Probably not. That child, Rufus Burnell Lott, my dad’s only brother and the Uncle ’Nell I’ve mentioned so fondly in several of my writings, was born the following January. He died this past November, just two months shy of his 99th birthday. I wonder if Grandma could’ve predicted these things.
A Word to Ponder
nib·ling (noun): a gender-neutral term used to refer to a child of one's sibling as a replacement for "niece" or "nephew." The word, patterned after “sibling,” is thought to have been coined in the early 1950s, but was relatively obscure for several decades before being revived in recent years.
www.merriam-webster.com
Song of the Day
“Family Affair” by Sly and the Family Stone (There's a Riot Goin' On, 1971)