When the Library of Congress celebrates its bicentennial on April 24, 2000, a Mississippi cultural tradition dating back more than a century will be a part of its birthday observance.

Since 1893, the town of Ripley, Mississippi--the seat of Tippah County--has been the site of the First Monday Sale and Trade Days. These monthly gatherings, first held on the courthouse square and later just off the square, provided local farmers who had produce and livestock to trade or sell with an opportunity to meet potential buyers when they came to town.

Over the years, Ripley’s First Monday has grown far beyond its intended audience and its original purpose. The 1940s witnessed a move to the Tippah County fairgrounds, a mile from downtown on the west side of Highway 15. The 1970s saw it change locations again, this time to an abandoned drive-in movie theater across the highway, where the event is now held.

Today, even the main trading day has shifted from the first Monday of the month to the weekend before the first Monday to accommodate as many as 50,000 people who come from as far away as Pennsylvania, Indiana, Texas, New Mexico, and Wyoming. Along with goats, pigeons, and pea fowl, attendees now can buy, sell, or trade almost anything imaginable: toys, quilts, video games, sunglasses, auto parts, compact discs, wigs, T shirts, and miscellaneous items of every description.

But as Ripley’s First Monday enters a third century, it now has joined a select group of American cultural traditions, from all 50 states, that have been documented and preserved for posterity. At the suggestion of U.S. Senator Thad Cochran, First Monday in Ripley was recently documented by the Center for inclusion in a Library of Congress bicentennial project known as Local Legacies.

David Wharton, director of documentary projects and assistant professor of Southern Studies at Ole Miss, visited Ripley nine times in 1999 to photograph First Monday as one of Mississippi's 11 Local Legacies projects to be featured in bicentennial activities at the Library of Congress this spring. Oral historian Wiley Prewitt Jr. often accompanied Wharton on his trips and interviewed many of the persons being photographed.

“It’s a modern version of what life may have been like in 1900,” said Wharton, a recent transplant to Mississippi whose photographic subjects usually encompass some aspect of the rural social landscape. “Ripley’s First Monday Sale and Trade Days are a part of Mississippi culture that goes back more than a hundred years and is alive and well today.”

A representative selection of Wharton’s First Monday photographs, along with selected portions of Prewitt¹s interviews, will be officially unveiled at a Library of Congress bicentennial event next May to be attended by Local Legacies participants and their U.S. senators and representatives.

But Ripley and Tippah County residents were able to have an advance look at the 69 photographs, which have become part of a permanent exhibition on First Monday at Ripley’s Tippah County Historical Museum. Center Director Charles Reagan Wilson and Associate Professor of History and Southern Studies Ted Ownby joined Wharton and Prewitt for a trip to Ripley on January 22 for a special slide preview of the project at the People's Bank Operations Center. In addition to Wharton's slide presentation and comments by Wilson, Ownby, and Prewitt, the program included a welcome by Ripley Mayor Louis Davis and short talks by Tippah County Historical Museum Curator Odalene Coley, Ripley librarian and local historian Tommy Covington, and Jerry Windham, son of First Monday proprietor Wayne Windham. The event was well attended. After the program, the crowd repaired 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.”

Michael Harrelson