Shelby Foote - Gone: A Photographic Plea For Preservation

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am deeply grateful, from the bottom of my heart,
to the following collaborators:

THE PROJECT
Mentor: Shelby Foote
Permission: Gwyn Foote

THE BOOK
introduction: Robert Hicks
Agent: Anna Olswanger, Liza Dawson Associates
Publisher: Debra Dixon, BelleBooks
editor: Deborah smith, BelleBooks
Design: Ian Shimkoviak and Alan Hebel,
the book Designers
concept: David Chickey, Skolkin + Chickey
Press: Four color Print Group

RESEARCH
Princella Knowell
Mississippi Heritage trust: David Preziosi:
Mississippi Department of Archives and History:
ken P'Pool
Jennifer Baughn:
Jim Barnett

POINT SCOUT
Chelius Carter

PHOTOGRAPHY LOCATIONS
Edward L. Blake
Harold Fisher
W. O. Fitch
Ernest Flora, Jr.
Warren Grabau
Pam Harvey
Al Hollingsworth
John Hurdlell
Pastor Johnny Mackin
Kevin McAlexander
Stuart McBride
Mimi and Ron Miller
Bobby J. Mitchell
Mrs. D. G. Pearson
Grady Trenthem
Dr. Milton Wheeler
Sandra Wilburn
Dr. Eustace Winn

NELL DICKERSON

I WAS BORN in the South and raised in the south. I live in the south, and I already have my burial plot, bought and paid for, in the historic cemetery where all of my ancestors rest for eternity. My preservation creed is simple: Honor your past, protect your history, respect your ancestors and preserve your own culture. Whether this means keeping the family Bible or restoring the ancestral home or learning to speak Navajo or listening to your grandmother's tales, do whatever it takes to keep the stories alive.

Do we want our country to become nothing but a land of strip malls? Let's honor and preserve the reflections of our collective past that continue to make us a great nation. The battlefield sites, the historic buildings, the writings and photographs we save in our scrapbooks, the great-grandmother's hand sewn quilt, the grandfather's soapstone pipe. Our personal history is part of our national history, and we should pass it to our children with great reverence, because it is not just who we were, but who we are.

That point is the sole and soulful purpose of GONE.

Shelby Foote was my cousin by marriage, but like a typical Southern girl I simply called him Uncle. His story, Pillar of Fire, is, at heart, a cri de couer for the virtues war destroys in both the physical sanctity of our homes but also in the human spirit.

Uncle Shelby encouraged my interest in exploring the old Southern homesteads. In fact, his ancestral home south of Greenville, Mississippi was my first subject. There, I photographed the 1850s Italianate mansion Uncle shelby's ancestor lost in a poker game.

On the same trip I photographed The Burrus House, another 1850s survivor.

To find it I went first to the modern home of Eustace Winn, an elderly doctor and a direct descendent of J. C. Burrus.

Dr. Winn lived just a few blocks away from Shelby's boyhood home in Greenville.

The doctor invited me in and told me his family's antebellum history. They had owned a cotton plantation and, by the mid 1850s, were so prosperous they sent for a New Orleans architect, the ultimate sign of prestige, to design and build a home on their land.

In those days, Dr. Winn explained, the architect lived on the job site and oversaw the construction work. He used timbers hand-hewn from the local cypress trees on the place. That's why the house has remained standing for so long. Sherman's army let this one go and didn't burn it because the Yankee officer in charge had gone to school at the University of Virginia with my great-grandfather.

Of course, as in all of the most fascinating antebellum houses, someone famous had once hidden in the attic. Confederate General Jubal Anderson Early took refuge there on his flight to Mexico after The War ended.

Although the Burrus house survived Sherman's burning it fell on hard times in the twentieth century, despite some brief fame as the set for Baby Doll, a movie directed by the famed Elia Kazan and written by Tennessee Williams (who lived in the house during filming). The grand old place stole every scenegothic and haunted, even then.

Its decline continued. No one in the Burrus family wanted to live there. It was too far from town. After Dr. Winn inherited it he didn't have the resources to keep it up.

I followed his directions to the house. It was hidden off of the road on a working farm. The caretaker expected me. Several dogs and a few horses followed me around the property as I surveyed the exterior. The original two-story front porch was gone. I found it stored carefully in a parlor, recuperating. A tornado had blown it down.

Yet the house still had a grand, circular stair in the entry. It had double parlors downstairs. I was enthralled. I felt welcome there, as if the house wanted me to photograph it, to tell its story.

I hoped I could help it survive.

Five years later, on another shooting trip, I was elated to see the beginning of restoration in progress. Two more years passed when I received an unexpected email from the doctor's grandson and namesake, Eustace H. Winn IV:

A year after you took the photographs, the restoration of the house began and today we are almost finished. You would not recognize the place...

I think your photography is an inspiration for historic preservation, and the proof that the photos in GONE can RETURN may inspire others, because it has helped inspire me to continue the preservation of other historic houses in the area.

Words capture memories and inspire dreams. So do photographs. Together, Shelby and I, combining his words and my pictures, may have had a hand in saving a bit of the precious legacy of our historynot just Southern history, but American history, a place in our time, a timeless place.

On behalf of my Uncle Shelby, and in honor of all those who respect and treasure our collective heritage, I look forward to a future that preserves our past.

House, circa 1859, Restored 2010, Bolivar County, Mississippi

These Southern states are from an
1860 map of the United States of America.

Entered according to Act of Congress in the year
1860 by S. Augustus Mitchell, Jr. in the Clerks
Office of the District Court of the U.S. Eastern
District of Pennsylvania.

Stars indicate photographic locations.

Map courtesy of Murray Hudson
Halls, Tennessee

Plaster Leaf, circa mid 1800s, Amite County, Mississippi

Parlor, circa mid 1800s, Amite County, Mississippi