The King Bee
As most readers of My Back Pages know, I was born in the South Mississippi community of Big Level in the early 1950s. I spent my first nineteen years there in Stone County before marrying and moving off to finish college and make my home and career upstate. Frequent readers will also know that my Lott, Bond, and Breland great-great-grandparents were among the earliest white settlers who migrated there in the 1820s and ’30s to stake their living in the heart of the prime timber and farming acreage of that wide and flat tableland. I’ve written several times about those first-generation pioneers who settled in Big Level and called it home. But this article is not about those pioneers. Rather, it’s about a relative late-comer, a larger-than-life individual who established in 1917 one of Big Level’s most impressive institutions: the King Bee Ranch.
“King Bee”—sounds pretentious, doesn’t it? Maybe even more so than “Big Level.” However, the appellation is appropriate, for at the time it was established, the King Bee Ranch was the largest cattle and farming operation the area had ever seen.
The development of the King Bee in the lower section of Big Level is well-documented in the contemporaneous articles written by my great-great-uncle Crab Breland in his weekly “Crab-ology” and “Stone County News” columns for the Biloxi-Gulfport Daily Herald newspaper. The first hint of something big to come was this small item in the August 7, 1917, issue: “J. B. Dorsett was on a prospecting trip this week to lower Big Level, where rumor has it that he expects to open up an extensive farm.” Equally intriguing was this mention two weeks later: “J. B. Dorsett left Saturday evening for Tunica County, where he owns 160 acres of land, to make arrangements to have it cleared and made ready for a cotton crop next year. From there he will visit Memphis, Tenn. and New Athens, Ill. with plans to purchase a machine for spreading crushed lime rock while he is away. He has secured a freight rate of $1.72½ a ton on the crushed rocks to the Wiggins station and expects to use somewhere near 300 tons in his Big Level farming operations next year. He expects to be away on the trip four or five days.”
Yep, something big was happening, sho’nuff big. And on August 31, under the headline, “Dorsett’s new ranch, the King Bee,” Crab tells us more specifically what was afoot:
We have been invited, unofficially, by numerous friends to go up to Camp Shelby and look things over in a Crabological way, but we are afraid to do it. Not afraid on account of any physical timidity, but because the ways of peace have more attractions for us than the ways of war. So, on Tuesday of this week, we accepted an invitation from J. B. Dorsett to visit his camp on lower Big Level where he is opening up a large stock farm and to take dinner with him. Mr. Dorsett has contracted a part of this work and in addition, is on the job himself with a crew of day laborers and is personally directing the work of fencing, clearing, stumping, and plowing the land. On the day of our visit about twenty hands all told were at work on the property. In addition to getting about 300 acres into a pasture he expects to get about 200 acres whipped into a good state of cultivation by planting time next spring. He wants the land plowed before winter sets in so that the sod will have time to rot and the soil mellow up for the spring planting. A well has been put down and headquarters established at the Frank Bond old place, and the work is being pushed westward from there. About l,200 fence posts have already been set, and a railcar of wire is expected to arrive in a few days. The farm has been christened “King Bee Ranch” and Mr. Dorsett says that, if his plans do not fall through, he expects to build up a model farm that will be a thing of beauty and a joy forever. He expects the farm to be self-sustaining after the first year and gradually grow into a source of revenue. One of the attractive features of the place, when fenced and finished, will be a broad lane, or avenue, straight as a die, and just a mile long, through which the Perkinston public road runs. Stumps are to be removed and the road graded up to perfection. Along this lane on either side, he expects to set a row of paper-shell pecans and other fruit trees. As we have said before, the ways of peace suits us best, and, although we spent the noon hours at King Bee Ranch lying on an army cot, reading a copy of the Lone Scout, we did not feel at all war-like and had no inclination to tackle the army of pine stumps that were then under fire.
I’ve edited this Google map image of a portion of the Big Level Community in Stone County, Mississippi to show the approximate location of the King Bee Ranch at the intersection of King Bee Road and City Bridge Road. The ranch, founded in 1917, grew within 5 years to take in more than a thousand acres, mostly to the south of King Bee Road and on both sides of City Bridge Road. I’ve not attempted to do a thorough study of the land records; therefore, I don’t know the exact size nor the exact boundaries of the ranch. But, it is apparent from the information I’ve gleaned from Uncle Crab’s accounts that the area encompassed by the ranch was most likely irregularly shaped, having grown from Dorsett’s acquisitions of several neighboring farms, and further, it may not have all been contained in one contiguous parcel.
I should pause here and interject that the Perkinston road mentioned above has for many decades now been known as the King Bee Road. Running east and west, it crosses the City Bridge Road near where the Big Level Grocery, another old institution, sits. And the road is still “straight as a die” in that section. While I’m paused, I should also mention that two of my mother’s brothers, my uncles Warren and Gorden Bond, owned a good portion of the old King Bee from the late 1940s through the early 1990s and operated a successful farming and cattle ranching partnership on this prime real estate. These Bond brothers married the twin daughters of Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence Richard Hatten who lived there on King Bee Road and owned the Big Level Grocery (then known as Hatten Grocery). The Hattens sold, or gave, the store to these two sisters and their husbands, who then operated it for several decades. I have early memories of the old wooden building that housed the store before my aunts and uncles built the present-day concrete block structure that is still in use today. Furthermore, I have many recollections of the time I spent down at the old King Bee during the halcyon days of my youth when my uncles owned it, whether we were hauling hay, swimming in the large cow ponds, jumping out of the loft of the hay barn, or simply hanging out with my Bond cousins at our large family gatherings. I’d love to tell you about my uncles’ herd of purebred Charolais cattle and the large, modern hog parlor they built, but those are stories that will have to wait. As you might can tell, I look back on all of these things with much fondness. Now, back to the King Bee of a hundred years ago.
Both in size and scope, the King Bee truly was king. And, in many respects, so was its founder. John B. Dorsett was a familiar name to Crab’s readers. Even before the opening of the King Bee, few individuals got more notice in Crab’s columns than this Scott County transplant, who came to Stone County a few years before to manage the Kennedy & Co. mercantile store and cotton gin in Wiggins. He soon became one of its principal owners. As the company prospered, Dorsett’s prominence in city and county affairs also increased, and it seems, so did Crab’s admiration of him. For several years before 1917, Crab reported Dorsett’s comings and goings. From those reports we learn that J. B. had business interests in Tunica County in the Delta, that he owned land there and in West Tennessee. His frequent trips to these areas and to St. Louis and other cities were all reported, as he checked on his personal business interests and those of Kennedy & Co. Those trips continued, and seemed to grow more frequent, after the opening of the King Bee.
Within three or four years, the King Bee Ranch grew to take in well over a thousand acres, mostly south of King Bee Road and on both sides of City Bridge Road. In addition to the Frank Bond place mentioned above, Dorsett acquired several other neighboring farms, including those of J. B. Hatten, S. F. O’Neal, and J. L. Bond. (John Lampkin Bond, my 3rd cousin twice removed, homesteaded the farm I grew up on in Upper Big Level. A few years before the King Bee was formed, J. L. had sold that place and purchased a 120-acre farm in lower Big Level near his boyhood home, and where his aged father, Marion “Bud” Bond still lived. J. L. then sold this 120-acre farm to Dorsett in 1921 and retired to Wiggins.)
Dorsett seemed to be larger than life, at least in the eyes and pen of Uncle Crab. Clearly, he did things in a big way. In September of 1917, only one month after opening the ranch, Dorsett traveled to Fort Worth and other points in Southwest Texas to purchase cattle, taking advantage of the extreme drought they were having out there to buy, at bargain prices, cows that were suffering from the lack of good grazing. I would have loved to have been around back then to see the train pulling into the Wiggins station loaded with the cattle and horses he bought, over a hundred head. Likewise, I would have also loved to have witnessed the 12-mile cattle drive from the depot out to the newly-fenced pastures of the King Bee.
The following March (in 1918), a tractor was delivered to the King Bee. As near as I have been able to determine, it was the first one seen in Big Level, maybe in the whole county. It was a Fordson model, with a plow-pulling capacity of 8 horsepower. It wouldn’t be long before tractors would begin replacing mules on many of the larger farms around Big Level and nationwide. By the way, if you don’t know, Fordson was an early brand name used by the Ford Motor Co. for its tractors and trucks and other heavy equipment. The first Fordson tractor was introduced in 1917, indicating that Dorsett was ahead of the curve as an early adopter. Within a few years, Dorsett held an auction at the King Bee and sold over 50 horses and mules, retaining only a few head to work alongside his several tractors.
Things were always humming on the ranch, and Uncle Crab reported almost all of it, from the construction of big barns and sheds, the clearing of land, the plantings and harvests, the cane syrup making, and all sorts of other goings on, including the purchase of 20 railcar loads of barnyard manure from Camp Shelby.
And then, in January of 1923, J. B. Dorsett died unexpectedly following a brief illness. He was 51. Uncle Crab reported it this way:
Large crowd attends Dorsett’s funeral
One of the most largely attended funerals ever held in Stone County was that of J. B. Dorsett at Wiggins, Saturday afternoon. Mr. Dorsett was one of the best-known citizens of the county and the shock of his death was felt by the entire citizenship of the area where he had lived the life of usefulness. The funeral was held at the Wiggins Baptist church, of which institution he was a member, with interment in the city’s cemetery, Rev. H. H. Wilson saying the last rites. The Ku Klux Klan were represented at the grave by five robed members who paid their respects by their presence and with beautiful floral offerings. [The Biloxi-Gulfport Daily Herald, 16 Jan 1923 p2]
Whoa! What was that? The KKK paid their respects! In full regalia, no less! Hmmm? I’m going to leave that right where Crab left it, without further comment or speculation. You can draw your own conclusions.
Dorsett’s widow sold the ranch not long after his death. Crab reported in a 1925 article that Mississippi Senator M. P. Lowrey Love was one of the new owners, and in 1929 he mentioned that “the Love gin on King Bee” had started up. Over the ensuing years—how many I don’t yet know—the land holdings were sold off in various parcels, including those later purchased by my uncles. And, thus, the King Bee was no more, passing from living memory with the death of the older residents of Big Level and Stone County, with its grand and imposing history largely unknown to the current generation. It is only in the name of the well-traveled road through Lower Big Level that the name lives on.
King Bee Road at the intersection of City Bridge Road in Lower Big Level, Stone County, Mississippi. [photo by Russell W. Lott, 26 May 2024]
A WORD TO PONDER
hal·cy·on (adj.): denoting a period of time in the past that was idyllically happy and peaceful. (pronounced: hal·see·uhn)
The word comes from a story in Greek mythology about the halcyon bird, which had the power to calm the rough ocean waves every December so she could nest. Like those calm waters, halcyon has come to mean a sense of peace or tranquility. People often use the phrase halcyon days to refer idyllically to a calmer, more peaceful time in their past.
www.vocabulary.com
SONG OF THE DAY
“Riding With the King” by B. B. King and Eric Clapton (Riding With the King, 2000)