Arcadia — My Back Pages

I’m sure the image below will resonate with several readers of My Back Pages, particularly those who are of my generation and with roots in Stone County, Mississippi. It depicts the two-topped pine tree that once stood along Highway 26, as a well-known landmark east of Big Level between Black Creek and Benndale. Some will be able to recall exactly where it was located, there on the south side of the road and almost to the George County line.

Back in the early 1950s, a year or two before I was born, the State Highway Department embarked on a roadway project straightening and modernizing Highway 26 from Wiggins to Lucedale. The newly-created stretch of road depicted here cut through a sparsely populated portion of the DeSoto National Forest to the Pascagoula River and on across. The highway engineers in their whimsy—more so than wisdom, maybe—decided to leave this distinctive tall tree with the double canopy right there in the right of way.

This is my representation of the two-topped pine tree that once stood along Highway 26 near the Stone/George County line. It’s been gone for over 30 years now, and having no actual photo of it, I constructed this image, using an actual view of Highway 26 from near that spot that I captured from Google Earth. I then created the double canopy from two different trees along that route. It’s crudely done, I know, but it satisfies my recall sufficiently.

Seldom did my family travel that way. In fact, we didn’t often have reason to go out of the county. From time to time, we’d go south to Gulfport and Biloxi or north to Hattiesburg, but only occasionally would we go eastward, and I can’t remember that we ever went westward towards Poplarville. So, as a kid, the sight of this tree on the eastern county line always heightened my level of excitement. It meant only one thing: my family and I were on a car trip and Big Level was now several miles behind us. Even though we were probably going to spend a week with relatives, only adventure lay ahead.

Though most of my aunts and uncles and cousins lived in south Mississippi, many in Stone County, my Aunt Connie, Mama’s closest-in-age sister, lived in Georgia. In the 1940s, Connie met and married Hansel Boyette, an Air Force man at Keesler AFB in Biloxi, and settled with him near his boyhood home between Ray City and Lakeland, two small Georgia towns not far from Valdosta in the south-central part of that state. During the 1950s and ’60s, my family made several summer trips to see her and Uncle Hansel and their five boys. Three of those Boyette boys were about the same age as my brothers and I, so naturally we got along great and had a lot of fun together.

On those trips, Mama and Daddy would get up several hours before daybreak—she preparing a picnic basket with breakfast and lunch and he stowing the suitcases in the back of the car and making a final check under the hood. And while it was still dark, they would roust the 4, 5, and eventually 6 of us children out of bed, pile us in the car, and off we’d go, getting to Aunt Connie’s in mid-afternoon, 10 or 11 hours later. Of course, we’d lose an hour crossing into the eastern time zone. Then we’d get that hour back on the return trip. That fact always played tricks on my young brain, as it seemed to take the same number of hours coming as it did going.

I recall that we had two different Ford sedans back in the ’50s before Daddy bought a used Rambler station wagon or our growing family. On those long trips, back in those early years, I would typically be in the middle of the back seat standing on the floorboard hump—a prime spot for a wide-eyed view of the road. Judy and Keith, my older siblings, would also be in the back seat, propped up on pillows. My younger brother, John, would either be in Mama’s lap or standing on the bench seat between her and Daddy. It seemed that Keith would always be asleep again before we’d gotten on the blacktop.

Past the two-topped tree, clearly visible in the car’s headlights, we’d go, and then across the Pascagoula River. On each crossing of that mile-long bridge, Mama would proudly proclaim to us children that both of our grandfathers had done carpentry work on that bridge when it was being built. That seemed like ancient history to me, though in actuality, the first time I recall her mentioning it, the bridge had only been completed 5 or 6 years before.

We’d then make our way through Lucedale, past the Coffeepot Restaurant and its famous scratching post, never to actually stop to get a picture of me scratching my back. Keep in mind that there were no bypasses or 4-laned interstate highways in those days. I miss that at times. What there was aplenty were stop signs and traffic lights—too many to count—in every small town we passed through. I don’t miss that.

We’d arrive in Mobile about daybreak. It was a marvel to me to see how many people were already stirring in that big city in the early morning. Daddy would negotiate the route without a map and make our first stop at the Krispy Kreme on Government Street. I didn’t know it then, but that was the first Krispy Kreme established in the Deep South, and for the longest, it was the only one. I can still remember how painful it was for us kids to sit in the car and watch while Daddy and Mama sat at the counter inside drinking their morning coffee—from ceramic cups and saucers, no less—and eating a couple of donuts. After what seemed like an hour, but was probably only 15 or 20 minutes, they would return to the car with a box of a dozen hot, freshly-glazed donuts. Glory hallelujah! It’s no wonder that Krispy Kreme donuts have been a lifelong obsession with me—I come by it naturally.

With Daddy refreshed, we’d quickly be moving again, ready to enter the Bankhead Tunnel, just a few blocks away. Do I have to remind anyone of what an amazing adventure that was for a youngster, to travel under the Mobile River and then out over that several-miles-long bridge and causeway over Mobile Bay?

By breakfast time, we’d stop at the welcome station at the Florida state line. Daddy would make sure we all went to the restroom and help us get our complimentary orange juice while Mama spread out our breakfast on a picnic table. I can guarantee you that that breakfast was better than any fast-food drive-thru meal you can get today.

Through a number of Florida towns we’d travel: Crestview (home of a Sunday afternoon gospel singing TV show that Daddy and Mama liked that featured the Florida Boys Quartet), DeFuniak Springs, Marianna, and on to Chattahoochee, where we crossed the Apalachicola River and time zone line. From there we’d skirt above Tallahassee up to Thomasville, Georgia, and on through several odd-sounding little communities (Pavo, Barney, Hahira) before arriving at Aunt Connie’s, road weary and exhausted, but ready for a week of cousin-fun and adventure.

As much as I enjoyed and looked forward to those trips, Aunt Connie’s wasn’t the only place we’d go on our summer vacations. Once, Daddy took us to the Smokies to see Rock City atop Lookout Mountain in Chattanooga. On the way back, we made a memorable trek through a section of North Mississippi where none of us had ever been, not even my parents. We made brief stops at three of the four large flood control reservoirs that dot I-55 at Sardis, Enid, and Grenada. Those lakes were such a wonder to me as a youngster; that I would live a few miles up the interstate from Sardis in Senatobia for over 30 years would have been totally inconceivable to my younger self.

Oh, yeah, there was another trip—the one I didn’t get to go on. Back in ’63, I think it was, Daddy and Mama took Keith and Judy on a 3-day excursion to Vicksburg and parts thereabouts. I was mightily disappointed they told me that I wouldn’t be able to go with them. There may have been tears. Okay, buckets of tears. I can understand that Mama may have needed a break from her smaller children, Linda was only 11 or 12 months old, Karen was soon to turn 3, and John was 7, but heck, I was 9, for goodness sakes. I wouldn’t have been a bit of bother. I never did understand why I had to stay with Aunt Angie and Uncle I. D. It was a long time before I got over that decision, despite the fact that staying with my Hickman cousins turned out to be a lot of fun.

As memorable as those trips were, they don’t stand out quite like the very first long car trip that I can clearly recall. It was in the summer of 1959, when I was 5 and about to start the first grade. That’s when we traveled all the way down the Florida peninsula to the exotic-sounding town of Arcadia. Never heard of Arcadia? It’s on the Gulf side of the peninsula below Tampa and St. Petersburg, almost to Fort Myers and inland about 50 miles. It was a forever long drive.

We made the trip down in one day, without an overnight stop. The first leg of the route was much like I described above, but we left several hours earlier, and instead of turning northward into Georgia as we neared Tallahassee, we veered southward and drove through mile after mile of palmetto desert, eventually reaching little Arcadia. One of the most indelible highlights of that long slog was crossing the Sunshine Skyway, the large bridge that stretched over Tampa Bay at St. Petersburg. That bridge, when completed in 1954, had only two lanes and was the longest that any of us had ever seen. I can remember Daddy fussing about the toll charge. We took a different route on the return trip to avoid paying it twice.

This is a current image from Google Maps showing (in my red annotations) our home community of Big Level, Mississippi, and the small town of Arcadia, Florida. It was quite the drive back in the 1950s, before interstate highways and other modern roadways.

Okay, here’s a question for you. Why did we drive all the way down to that small Florida town, a place that seemed to my eyes to offer nothing but orange and grapefruit trees and sand spurs galore? If you guessed family, then you’d be right.

Several months before, Mama’s parents (my Bond grandparents) and all her siblings and their families—all of them, including Mama’s youngest sister, Wyvena, who was still in high school—picked up and moved to Arcadia. And why did they all haul off en masse to such a remote area? To ply the family’s stumping trade, of course.

In case you don’t know about stumping, it’s an activity that used to be a thriving commercial enterprise throughout the Pine Belt back in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s. After the virgin timber had been cut and removed, there was money to be made harvesting the lighterd stumps that remained. These heart-pine remnants, large and small, and filled with resin, were blasted and bulldozed out of the ground, then hauled to various processing plants—the Hercules Company in Hattiesburg operated a big one.

For several years, here in our good ol’ stomping grounds of Stone County and surrounding areas, Papa Bond and his adult sons (my uncles Warren, Gorden, Wynon, and Derlyn) were engaged in the stumping business. However, by the late ’50s, the once-plentiful stumping grounds of South Mississippi began to get scarce. I don’t know which of these Bond men first had the idea, Papa or his boys, including at this time his sons-in-law, I. D. Hickman and Hansel Boyette, but they decided to move to Arcadia—all of them—where stumps were still plentiful and good money was to be made. And so, they went.

Now, here’s another question, a real mystery to me. Why didn’t Daddy and Mama join the rest of the Lamar Bond family on this lucrative, I suppose, sojourn to sunny Florida? Was it because of Mama’s small children? I don’t think so; all the others had small young’uns. Was Daddy making good money where he was, as an auto mechanic in Wiggins? Maybe; he had just moved from the Evans Ford place to Star Chevrolet, and was regarded as one of the best mechanics in town. Actually, Daddy had also briefly tried his hand at stumping. I can remember a crate with a few sticks of dynamite out in the shed behind our house. (There’s a story about that dynamite that’ll have to wait for another time.) In all probability there were more than a few family dynamics at play that I had no idea of at the time, nor did anyone talk about later. Only until I hatched the idea for this blog piece did I even begin to contemplate the oddness of the fact that my family was the exception in the larger extended family that chose not to uproot and relocate to Arcadia. Sadly, there’s hardly anyone left that I can ask who might be able to shed some light on the question. I’d love to hear from some of my older cousins about this.

As it turned out, none of the Bonds stayed in Arcadia very long. Papa and Grandma were back in Stone County two years later. So were Uncle Warren and Uncle Gorden, as were Uncle Derlyn and Aunt Angie. Aunt Connie’s family returned to Georgia about the same time and Uncle Hansel continued to stump there. And Uncle Wynon, who stayed in Arcadia the longest, eventually settled in Waycross, Georgia, where he also started a stumping operation. Maybe Daddy sensed that going to Arcadia would be a short-term proposition and weighed that against the disruption the move would cause. I wonder.

Admittedly, as a 5-year-old, my memories of that grand trip are spotty. In addition to the things I’ve already described, I can recall clearly stepping out the back door of Uncle Warren’s house in Arcadia and picking oranges and grapefruit from the trees right there in the front and back yards. I vividly remember the sand spurs being almost deadly to my bare feet, compared to the garden-variety stickers we had back home. I can still picture Judy showing me how to follow our progress on the roadmap and reading the placenames to me. I can also remember having lunch out of the trunk of the car, and the kool-aid we had from the spout of the large thermos camping jug. I can still feel how excited I was on our return trip when I spotted the two-topped pine tree, knowing that we were finally back in Stone County and only 15 minutes from home.

A WORD TO PONDER

lighterd, also lightard, lighter’d, and light’erd (noun): a dialectical contraction of lighter wood or light wood; an American Southernism for the resinous remains of heart pine timber, particularly useful for kindling to start a fire.
“Whistling Dixie: A Dictionary of Southern Expressions” by Robert Hendrickson, 1993

SONG OF THE DAY

“A Summer Song” by Chad & Jeremy (Yesterday’s Gone, 1964)

Bonus Track

“Ring of Fire” by Johnny Cash (Ring of Fire: The Best of Johnny Cash, 1963)