Ripley, Mississippi has a population of about 5000. It is the seat of Tippah County, in the northeastern part of the state. The Tennessee state line is about 20 miles to the north, straight up Highway 15. If you take Highway 4 and then Highway 30 to the east, you will come to the Alabama line in about 45 miles. Tupelo, Mississippi, a community of about 35,000 and the seat of Lee County, is 40 miles to the southeast. The closest city is Memphis, Tennessee, about 75 miles to the northwest.

The First Monday Sale and Trade Days (generally known as “First Monday”) has been part of Ripley’s community life since 1893. Originally held on the first Monday of every month, it now takes place on the weekend preceding the first Monday. The event attracts hundreds of vendors, some of whom are professionals who visit Ripley as a regular part of their travels on the Southern flea market circuit. Others are amateurs who set up booths more for fun than profit; most of this latter group sell their wares only at Ripley. The standard wisdom is that you can find anything you want at First Monday (and a lot you probably don’t want but might buy anyway). Items offered for sale or trade include sunglasses, guinea fowl, videotapes, baby strollers, sweet potatoes, bumper stickers, shotguns, porch swings, worn-out farm implements, dolls, microwave ovens, dogs, T-shirts, artificial floral arrangements, and just about everything in between. Thousands of people flock to Ripley on First Monday weekends, eager to trade, buy, talk, and gawk. They come from throughout the deep South and often from much farther away. On July 31, 1999 there were cars from Texas, Missouri, Ohio, Arizona, Indiana, and New York in the parking lot, as well as from Mississippi and surrounding states.

Originally held on Ripley’s courthouse square, First Monday has changed locations several times over the years. At first, it enjoyed the support of both the town’s business community and local government. Hoping to profit from all the rural people coming to town on Trade Day, most Ripley merchants designated the first Monday of the month as a special “Grand Bargain Day.” The county helped out by having the sheriff’s office hold auctions of stray livestock and other unclaimed property from the courthouse steps. Before long, though, the congestion created by the monthly influx of people, animals, and wagons began to outweigh the Trade Day’s advantages (as far as the merchants were concerned), and sometime during the 1910s, First Monday relocated to a site a few blocks off the square. In the 1940s, because of noise and sanitation concerns, it moved out of Ripley’s business district altogether, to the intersection of Highways 4 and 15, a quarter mile or so downhill from the square. Shortly after that, probably in the early 1950s, First Monday relocated again, this time to the Tippah County Fairgrounds, about a mile south on Highway 15. It settled in its present location, even farther south on Highway 15, in 1978.

The present First Monday grounds are about two miles south of downtown Ripley, at what was once a drive-in movie theater on the east side of Highway 15. The unpaved parking lot is right off the highway. At each of several entrances, teenagers collect $1.50 from those who want to park there. (Some people prefer to park for free on the highway’s western shoulder, despite the possibility of being towed.) Across the parking lot are the sales grounds--an oval-shaped fifty acres with hundreds of booths arranged in gently curving rows. The ground is covered with caliche; this makes the site dusty when it’s dry and glaringly bright in the summer sun, but it also prevents the place from becoming too muddy when it rains. The walkways between the booths are often crowded with people: couples, families, cruising teenagers, gangs of children, tourists, working people, and retirees roam from booth to booth, always looking, sometimes stopping to talk or bargain with vendors, occasionally making a purchase. Scattered throughout are refreshment stands where you can get such standard American fare as hamburgers, corn dogs, sausage-on-a-stick, french fries, popcorn, ice cream, and soft drinks. (No alcoholic beverages are served at First Monday.) Foods with a more Southern flavor include pork rinds, boiled peanuts, fried pies, sweet tea, and fresh-squeezed lemonade. For those who want to get in out of the weather when they eat, there is the Trader's Inn, a cafeteria-style restaurant that offers hearty breakfasts, as well as “dinner” (served in the middle of the day) and supper in the Southern “meat & three” tradition.

As with any long-standing tradition, First Monday has gone through many changes over the years. At first, it was primarily a “trade day”--“an old hound dog for an old single barrel shotgun or plow tools for a mule,” as one life long resident of Ripley describes it--at which little or no money changed hands. This was largely out of necessity, since most turn-of-the-century farmers in northeast Mississippi were cash-poor in the extreme. Such “trading” is now pretty much a thing of the past at First Monday, though even as recently as the 1960s and ’70s, some old-timers disdained cash sales for the more subtle art of barter. One Ripley native remembers trying to buy a shotgun at First Monday from a man who was willing to negotiate a trade but wouldn’t even think about taking cash. Someone else recalls an elderly farmer in overalls waving a large pipe wrench over his head while walking the grounds and shouting, “Who will trade me a billy goat for this pipe wrench? I need a good billy goat, who needs a good pipe wrench?” There is also an old First Monday story, probably apocryphal, about a man who went to First Monday with a shotgun to trade. First he traded it for a hunting dog; a little while later, he traded the dog for a sewing machine. After a few more trades, he wound up with a shotgun. Only after getting home did he realize it was the same shotgun he had started the day with. True or not, this story hints at the passion among some at First Monday for trading. Today, even though price is often open to negotiation, nearly all First Monday business is transacted in cash. Some people mourn this change.

In 1999, at the suggestion of U.S. Senator Thad Cochran, First Monday was documented by The University of Mississippi's Center for the Study of Southern Culture for inclusion in a Library of Congress bicentennial project know as “Local Legacies.” David Wharton, director of documentary projects and assistant professor of Southern Studies at the Center, along with folklorist and oral historian Wiley Prewitt, Jr. and graduate assistant Donna Buzzard, visited Ripley nine times in 1999 to record First Monday as a “Local Legacies” project to be featured in bicentennial activities at the Library of Congress this spring. Under Library of Congress guidelines, a local legacy is a “traditional activity, event or area of creativity that merits being documented for future generations”-- a standard which Wharton said Ripley’s First Monday Sale and Trade Days readily met. “It’s a contemporary version of what commercial transactions in rural society were like in 1900,” said Wharton. “First Monday is a part of Mississippi culture that goes back more than a hundred years and is alive and well today.”

Sixty-nine of Wharton’s First Monday photographs have become a permanent exhibition at Ripley's Tippah County Museum. Officials from the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, including Center Director Dr. Charles Reagan Wilson, Associate Professor of History and Southern Studies Dr. Ted Ownby, and Wharton, were in Ripley on January 22, 2000, for a special slide preview of the project. In addition to comments by Wilson and Ownby and Wharton’s slide presentation, the program included a welcome by Ripley Mayor Louis Davis and short talks by folklorist and oral historian Wiley Prewitt, Jr.; Tippah County Museum Curator Odalene Coley; Ripley librarian and local historian Tommy Covington, and Jerry Windham, son of First Monday proprietor Wayne Windham. After the program, the crowd walked a block to the Museum, where they viewed the photographs firsthand. “This was our first exhibit of this kind,” museum curator Odalene Coley said. “It's extremely well done and very professional. We’ve had many compliments on it.”

All photographs ©1999 by David Wharton.