COPYRIGHT 1968
BY THE UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY PRESS
Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 68-29637
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint excerpts from the following works of Thomas D. Clark:
Selections from Frontier America: The Story of the Westward Movement by Thomas D. Clark are reprinted with the permission of Charles Scribners Sons. Copyright 1959 by Thomas D. Clark.
Selections from The Rampaging Frontier: Manners and Humors of The Pioneer Days in The South and The Middle West by Thomas D. Clark (now available as a Midland Book from Indiana University Press) are reprinted with the permission of the author. Copyright 1939 by Thomas D. Clark.
Selections from A History of Kentucky are reprinted with the permission of the author. Copyright 1937 by Thomas D. Clark.
Selections from Pills, Petticoats and Plows: The Southern Country Store by Thomas D. Clark are reprinted with the permission of the University of Oklahoma Press. Copyright 1964 by the University of Oklahoma Press. (This volume was originally published by Bobbs-Merrill in 1944.)
Selections from The Southern Country Editor by Thomas D. Clark are reprinted with the permission of the author. Copyright 1948 by Thomas D. Clark.
Selections from The Emerging South by Thomas D. Clark are reprinted with the permission of Oxford University Press. Copyright 1961 by Thomas D. Clark.
Selections from The South Since Appomattox: A Century of Regional Change by Thomas D. Clark and Albert D. Kirwan are reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press. Copyright 1967 by Oxford University Press, Inc.
Selections from Kentucky: Land of Contrast by Thomas D. Clark are reprinted with the permission of Harper & Row, Publishers. Copyright 1968 by Thomas D. Clark.
Selections from The Kentucky by Thomas D. Clark are reprinted with the permission of Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc. Copyright 1942 by Thomas D. Clark.
Research Possibilities in Southern History was published in the February 1950 (Volume XVI) issue of The Journal of Southern History, pp. 52-63. Copyright 1950 by the Southern Historical Association. Reprinted by permission of the Managing Editor.
Preserving Southern Historical Documents was published in the January 1953 (Volume XVI) issue of The American Archivist, pp. 27-37. Copyright 1953 by the Society of American Archivists.
The Common-Man Tradition in the Literature of the Frontier was published in the Spring 1957 (Volume LXIII) issue of The Michigan Alumnus, pp. 208-17. Copyright 1957 by the Alumni Association of the University of Michigan.
Americana in a State University Library was published in the 1963 [Volume XXIII] Bulletin of the University of Kentucky Library.
Travel Literature was published in Research Opportunities in American Cultural History, edited by John Francis McDermott. Copyright 1961 by the University of Kentucky Press.
INTRODUCTION
The North Central Hills section of the State of Mississippi is terra incognita to most Americans. Even the nomenclature is misleading, for much of the section is east central rather than north centraland the hills have little altitude. It was the fortune of Thomas D. Clark to be born and reared in this area of challenging economic conditions, remoteness from urban advantages, horse-and-buggy and mule-and-wagon transportation, no rural electrification, low hills, hard work, and cotton. Fortune? A person who has not met a man like Tom Clark, and never sized up Clark himself, might superficially conclude that it was a matter of unadorned misfortune in the early 1900s to be a child and then an adolescent in such a place, where life assuredly had harsh features and where opportunities for improvement of a farmboys lot did not seem to beckon. And yet to one who knows him or is aware of his contributions to American scholarship and American culture it was a singularly beneficial circumstance that an outstanding historian of the American frontier should have been so intimately acquainted with the realistic conditionsthe pluses and minusesof something akin to pioneer life.
Rural Mississippi between 1903 and 1928 was unlike the frontier in that most of its communities, though small, had long been settled. Its soil had yielded crops many decades before to ancestors of twentieth-century farmers. The dogtrot clapboard houses, the country stores, schools, and shotgun churches were by no means all new; many of them had long antedated the parents of Clarks generation. A further dissimilarity from much of the frontier lay in the fact that the North Central Hills area had its thousands of Negroes, even though they were not nearly so numerous as in Mississippi regions of generally richer soilto the east in the Black Prairie or to the west in the fabled Delta.
Frontier and near-frontier conditions, however, abounded. Louisville, Winston Countys seat of government and largest town, contained only 1,181 people in 1910. Noxapater, ten miles to the south, had only 311; Highpoint Village, 104, while places like Rural Hill and Flower Ridge were barely hamlets, aptly named. With slightly more than 17,000 people in the county, almost everyone was a member of a farm family. Louisville had its bank, its stores, and its newspaper office. But manufacturing plants were nowhere to be seen; youngsters, except a few who wandered a fur piece, had no firsthand view of a factory, a rolling-mill, a foundry. The Gulf, Mobile & Northern Railway was an innovation, connecting such communities as Pontotoc, Laurel, and Hattiesburg. And the only other intruder on traditional ruralism was the lumber industry with its steam sawmill.
The Clark farm where Tom grew up was situated off to the right, or west, of the unpaved road that led southward from Louisville to Noxapater, about eight miles from the former and four from the latter. Thomas D. Clarks mother belonged to an old Winston County family that included Grandfather Dionysius Bennetta local leader who served as a County Supervisor, a post giving him much authority in the sphere of road and fiscal operations. A schoolteacher both before and after her marriage, Sallie Bennett Clark bore seven children, of whom Thomas was the eldest. There is abundant evidence that she was the most important influence in the early intellectual development of her son. And equally certain it is that her younger brother, a superintendent of schools in Virginia, was just as influential in speeding the day of his nephews first successes in higher education.
Toms father, John Collingsworth Clark (Johnnie C. to his neighbors), was a member of a family which had settled in New England after crossing the Atlantic in colonial times. The name was spelled Clarke in those days, just as Bennett was Bennet, and early Clarkes were prominent regionally and nationally as well as in Rhode Island. Eventually some of them headed south and west. Matthew Clark and two of his sons participated in the Revolutionary War, serving under George Washington at Yorktown. Over half a century later, four of Matthews sons moved from Anderson County, South Carolina, to Mississippi near the Naniwaya Mound in the heart of the Choctaw country. Good cotton land had become available because of the departure of most of the Indians after the signing of the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek. Subsequently, Joseph Bennett took passage aboard a sailing vessel from Charleston to Mobile and then went north up the Tombigbee River. Other forebears of Thomas Clark were the McGees, who hailed from Warren County, Kentucky, and the Cagles, who in an earlier migration had made their way to North Carolina from Pennsylvania. All these people had been drawn at least in part by the widespread reports of the boom or flush times of the 1830s, which gave Mississippi such an enviable reputation for productivity and potential wealth that there was nothing strange about seeking ones fortune there. Also, this was the era before the Civil Wars destruction of southern farmers capitala catastrophe that necessitated the growing of an annual cash crop under the most discouraging financial handicaps.
