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Strawberry
Plains Oral History Project
Everyone at the Center is excited by the prospect of starting a new oral
history project in neighboring Marshall County. In partnership with Audubon
Mississippi, the Mississippi Humanities Council, and the University of Southern
Mississippi’s Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage, the Center
will soon be conducting a series of interviews with anyone who ever lived
on, or knew people who lived on, Strawberry Plains Plantation near Holly
Springs. Southern Studies graduate assistants Brooke Butler and Rob Hawkins
will be the primary interviewers.
Now known as the Strawberry Plains Audubon Center, the property is 2,500 acres
of open fields, seasonal creeks, and wooded hills. It also includes the antebellum
Davis House, as well as several tenant homes and outbuildings. Strawberry Plains
was willed to Audubon Mississippi in 1983 by sisters Ruth Finley and Margaret
Finley Shackelford, descendants of original owner Ebenezer Davis. It was a working
cotton farm from the 1830s through the 1950s and home to a number of tenant families
until the 1970s.
The goal of the oral history project is to interview anyone who has memories
of living there, visiting family or friends there, or who has heard accounts
of life at Strawberry Plains from others. Topics to be covered in the interviews
will include people’s working lives, both on and off Strawberry Plains;
family life there; recreational activities; religious life; special events (weddings,
births, funerals, baptisms); holidays or other special times of year (Christmas,
Easter, harvest time); foodways (especially those deriving directly from the
land—gardening, gathering of wild plants for food, hunting, fishing); other
uses of Strawberry Plains’ naturally occurring plants and animals (plants
gathered for medicinal purposes, fur trapping); and any other memories people
may have of human beings relating with the natural world at Strawberry Plains.
The oral history project is part of a larger effort by Audubon Mississippi to
compile as complete a natural and social history of the property as possible. “Our
human history and natural history are linked here, and we want to tell that story,” says
Madge Lindsay, executive director at Strawberry Plains. Other areas of inquiry
will include examination of the Davis and Finley family papers, recently donated
to the University of Mississippi Archive (see related article); archaeological
surveys of various sites on the property; and architectural analysis of several
of the remaining buildings. The oral history project is funded through a grant
from the Mississippi Humanities Council, with matching funds from Audubon Mississippi.
The Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage at the University of Southern
Mississippi will transcribe the interviews.
David Wharton
Madge Lindsay and David Wharton
photo by Rob Hawkins
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Rob
Hawkins and
Brooke
Butler
photo
by David Wharton
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