I completed a study of the history of Mississippi cotton mills and mill villages which should be listed in your bibliographies of Mississippi history. It is a continuation and expansion of my master's thesis in history at South-eastern Louisiana University several years ago. The thesis ignited my interest in the subject--especially upon learn-ing that there had been no other attempt to record the history of Mississippi cotton manufacturing--and I decided the history was too important not to be recorded. The book ‘A History of Mississipi Cotton Mills and Villages,’ 1995, is available at the Mississippi Department of Ar-chives and History in Jackson and most public libraries in the state.

The cotton manufacturing industry spearheaded industrial revolutions in England, continental Europe, New England, and the Piedmont states, and for that reason has been thoroughly studied in those regions--perhaps as much as any industry in history. While it fell short of igniting an industrial revolution in Mississippi, cotton manufacturing was extensive relative to other industry and paved the way for the state's industrialization in the 1940s and 1950s.

The study examines the historical development of cotton mills in the state, from the first mill at Natchez in 1834 to the demise of the Sanders's conglomerate of cotton mills in the 1950s. It visits the antebellum mills at Natchez, Bankston, Woodville, State Penitentiary, and Jackson; the post Civil War mills at Wesson, Stonewall, Cornith, Natchez, and Meridian; and the twentieth century mills at Mississippi A&M College, Tupelo, McComb, Berthadale, Natchez, Kosciusko, Laurel, Starkville, Magnolia, Meridian, West Point, Winona, and Yazoo City. How the turbulent years of the Civil War, the radical Reconstruction, the Great Depression, and World War ll affected Mississippi cotton manufacturing is reviewed.

Mill villages at Tupelo, Starkville, Kosciusko, Magnolia, Meridian, and Winona are highlighted. It focuses con-siderable attention to a typical Sanders mill village and its villagers from the late 1920s to the early 1950s; the village at Magnolia--a part of Sanders Industries which dominated the Mississippi cotton textile industry in the twentieth century--is the one examined. Magnolia's role in the 1934 nation-wide strike, the largest strike in American his- tory up to that time, is reviewed.

Special attention is given to Colonel James Wesson, the father of Mississippi cotton manufacturing, who built the state's first successful mechanically powered cotton mill at Bankston in 1848, and after it was burned by Federal troops in 1864, the mill at Wesson in 1867; Captain William Oliver who brought international fame to the mammoth Wesson mills; T. L. Wainwright who brought success to the Stone-wall mill, established in 1868 and the state's sole sur-viving cotton mill; and finally James Sanders and his son, Robert, who es- tablished and managed a conglomerate of Mississippi cotton mills in the first half of the twentieth century.

It concludes that the Industrial Revolution of the South, spearheaded by the cotton textile manufacturing in the 1880s, never really came to Mississippi. The state and its people refused to break away from agriculture, but some twenty-five cotton textile mills played a vital role in pav-ing the way for the industrialization that finally came with World War II and the 1940s. The industry acted as a bridge, especially during the 1920s and 1930s, between the farm and the factory.

It records for the first time an important part of Mississippi's history, and has a very special appeal to present and former Mississippi textile workers who were a part of it and their sons and daughters by the thousands who grew up in the mill villages.



Narvell Strickland, J.D.