This begins a six-part series detailing how a visionary yet peculiar band of Yankees migrated south to raise up a mixed-race city, and along the way shatter every social convention and business rule of the day.

City in a Bubble
Part 1

In 1891, twenty-six years after the Civil War ended, Laurel, Mississippi was taken over by Yankees. There were no shots exchanged, only paper. It wasn’t that Jones County had never seen Yankees before, but up until this point in time, they had successfully avoided being occupied by them.

Granted these invaders weren’t your regular run of Northerner. They refused to act like the wily, carpetbaggers we were used to. At first folks weren’t sure if our Yankees were simply fools with money to burn, or just outright crazy.

You can understand their confusion. This was in the age of robber barons—Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, Carnegies—the “Captains of Industry” who were known for amassing great fortunes while keeping their employees impoverished, driving them until they were maimed or killed on the job. The Goliaths commonly hired armed thugs to keep their workers in line. Sometimes it was no better than slavery, as so many forced their workers into debt to the company store that sold necessities on credit at exorbitant rates. Perhaps worst of all, these men operated mostly as absentee landlords whose practice was to extract all the wealth out of an area and then spend their plunder in more affluent surroundings.

Since the Civil War, the economically destitute but resource-rich South was ripe for the picking. By the time Our Yankees, families by the names of Gardiner and Eastman, came along, Mississippi was used to wealthy but lumber-poor Northerners sending their land buyers down to the Piney Woods, gobbling up huge acreages of yellow pine and then clear-cutting everything in sight. A plague of shantytowns followed railway construction. A sawmill sprouted up every time a mile of track was laid. The Laurel Leader Call said of those days, “…you could throw a baseball from sawmill to sawmill all the way to the Gulf.” Like an enormous hoard of locusts, the teams would deplete the land, and then move on to the next stop. All they left behind were abandoned mills and rotting shanties, a howling, ravaged wasteland. It wasn’t pretty, but it was standard business practice. At least that kind of ruthless shrewdness could be grudgingly admired.

In 1891, Laurel was in line to become the next dead town. It consisted of no more than a depot, a broken-down sawmill, and a handful of stores and saloons, all surrounded by played out land. The Laurel Leader Call put it more succinctly. The village of Laurel was “depressing, swampy, dirty, trash-heaped and malarial.”

That’s when our Yankees rode down from Iowa to the rescue. They traveled south by train and within the first few moments of setting foot in Mississippi they were slick-talked by a Jones County sawmill owner into buying him out of his failing operation, lock, stock, and barrel. For a generous $64,000 they got the ramshackle operation that had already cleared every tree that could be ox-carted to the depot, and 16,000 acres of timberland that nobody could get at. The bare, stump-strewn community was such a blemish on God’s earth that the former owner had refused even to name it after himself, not wanting to sully his reputation by having his memory forever associated with that hovel of a settlement. Instead, he called it Laurel, after a flowering bush that grew locally. Unfortunately the plant was toxic to livestock and had to be eradicated. Not an auspicious beginning.

Up to this point in the story we can credit our Yankees with merely being foolish. But here’s where the crazy comes in.

The Gardiners and the Eastmans promptly announced they were going to pack up their socialite wives and their privileged children, vacate them from their fine Iowa mansions and elite schools and transplant them to the bleakest, most isolated settlement in Mississippi, which, by the way, had to be the most Yankee-averse State in the Nation.

Like I said, Our Yankees were peculiar to say the least. It was said they believed they could raise up a civilized paradise by starting from scratch right there in the Piney Woods. But the question remained, if you were going to civilize anybody in the United States, why would you start out with folks as obstinate and primitive as the backwoods people of Jones County?

After all, Jones County was named after John Paul Jones whose famous line was “I have not yet begun to fight!” That was pretty true of Jones County. These folks would fight anybody, anytime, anywhere, just for the right to be left alone to their own ways.

This county was known as the “Free State of Jones” for more that one reason. Before the Civil War, it was hard to get anybody to stay, much less hold any kind of office. When you were in Jones County, things always seemed to look better someplace else. It was just a lot of pine forests and poor farming land. So for a large part of the County’s history, those who remained were free from any form of government and learned to work things out on their own, every man the master of his own world, no matter how meager. Some even extended this sense of freedom to family rearing. If the few men who owned a slave or two wanted to procreate with a favorite and raise up two families side-by-side, it was nobody’s business but theirs.

This attitude of fierce independence, combined with the relative scarcity of slavery, gave rise to the second reason for the county’s moniker, “The Free State of Jones”. During the Civil War the Jones County became home to Confederate deserters, Union sympathizers, and a great many others who claimed that if Mississippi could secede from the Union, then they could secede from Mississippi. The message again was, “just let us be!” The heroes of Jones County were not the grey-clad soldiers leading valiant but doomed charges into battle. The heroes of the Piney Woods were the men and women who used any means, fair or foul, to stay alive, feed their families, guard their farms, and steer clear of what they called, “a poor man’s fight and a rich man’s war.”

Respect for the role of authority didn’t gain much headway after the Civil War, either; and because there were so few former slaves, the main focus of the new Reconstructionist Administration , Jones County was left happily to its own devices. They made do on their small farms cut from the seemingly endless forests of pine.

This is pretty much the way our Yankees found Jones County on that fateful train excursion into the Piney Woods.

City in Bubble
Part 2

When our Yankees founders came to Laurel, Jones County was called by one of the Mississippi papers, “an underpopulated quagmire of 702 square miles.” It consisted of a few white communities, fewer black communities and one or two settlements that were known cryptically as White Negroes, folks who were too white to be black, too black to be white and kept mainly to themselves. The only thing the county had an abundance of was acres and acres of virgin yellow pine, too far removed from the railroads to be much good to anybody except badmen in hiding and razor back hogs.

I’ve often tried to imagine the day Mrs. Catherine Marshall Gardiner, the Grande Dame of the our Yankee clan, disembarked at the stump-stubbled depot called Laurel, looking around at what her husband had got her into. There she was in all her finery, a woman of wealth and sophistication, intimately acquainted with the nation’s moneyed elite, standing there on the rough-plank loading platform and surveying her new home. Goats and pigs roamed freely along the dirt-track streets. The shacks had never seen a pane of glass or a real cook stove. There were probably a couple of folks present that day who had never in their lives seen a train before she arrived.

She wrote to a friend soon after, “Although things are a bit crude, the people are real neighborly.” Now that is either deceitfully gracious or downright demented. If it was either, she never let on through all the years she lived in Laurel.

Her reports back home obviously didn’t discourage the other branches of the family. They all followed, the Gardiners and the Eastmans, our marvelous Yankees, as seemingly as rootless and oblivious as clouds, scouting out prime locations for their heavenly palaces in the Pine Belt.

The men began work with a vengeance. They tore down the old rickety sawmill and invested their fortune in bringing a genius of an engineer down from Milwaukee and designing a state-of-the-art milling operation. They sent for some their own men with specialized skills, but mainly they hired locally, paying better than market wages.

And to everyone’s surprise, these included black laborers.

It’s possible they hadn’t read the papers. After years of nightriders, massacres, and lynchings, Mississippi finally ratified the notorious Constitution of 1890 that put the Negro back in his place. It effectively eliminated his vote and sanctioned segregation, ensuring he would never be a political or economic threat to the white man again. But in this Yankee built never-never-land, black laborers worked side-by-side with whites, both in the camps and in the mill. Our Yankees were indeed treading dangerous waters.

Perhaps there were those who thought that the Panic of 1893 was their just desserts for flouting social conventions. Demand for lumber dried up and this modern marvel of a mill, the one that cost Our Yankees the last of their capital, almost came to a complete halt. They could not afford to pay their laborers, white or black.

Now folks were sure the Iowans would show their true colors. Any other lumber baron would tell their workers to get lost and to fend for themselves, and when business picked up, just start over with a new crew. After all, it wasn’t like Our Yankees owed them anything. Hard-nosed businessmen all agreed you couldn’t be sentimental and make it through these rough times.

Just the year before, Andrew Carnegie’s steel company in Pennsylvania unleashed 300 Pinkerton agents armed with brand new Winchesters on his workers. Ten were killed and hundreds wounded. In those days laborers were locked out, starved and beaten just to show who the boss was.

It was obvious Our Yankees hadn’t read the management books of the day. The first thing they did was to call the workers together and tell them the unvarnished truth. They were broke and couldn’t meet payroll. But then they did something even stranger. They told them if they agreed to accept a major cut in pay now, that when times improved, the company would give them all a raise in addition to reimbursing them for any back pay lost during the crisis.
They made a mutually beneficial deal that most companies in the 21st Century couldn’t pull off. After seven months of living hand to mouth, better times returned, and the owners did better than keep their promise. As a sign of gratitude, they donated the entirety of the first year’s profits, $600, toward the building of a school for the workers’ children. The mill did better than survive. The company-worker bond was perhaps stronger than any in the Nation.

A few years later in 1901, President Theodore Roosevelt outraged white Mississippians when he invited Booker T. Washington to the White House for lunch. James K. Vardaman rode that outrage all the way to the Mississippi Governor’s Mansion. He promised if elected he would close all schools for blacks. His sentiments were, “An educated nigger is the waste of a good field hand.” He was elected overwhelmingly.

Again, Our Yankees must have missed the inauguration speech. They went about building schools not only for their white employees but for the black workers as well, pushing the legal limits of segregation dangerously far. They publicly claimed that an educated citizen made a more valuable worker, black or white. It became evident that these Yankees were building their empire in a bubble, shielding it from the prevalent racist and monopolistic practices of the day. Maybe they figured their money and shrewd business-savvy would keep them above it all.

They were obviously right. Under Vardaman’s administration, Laurel got the credit for a lumber boom that dramatically boosted the State’s chronically ill economy. By the end of his administration in 1908, Mississippi ranked 3rd in the country in lumber production. Laurel alone was soon be turning out 1,000,000 board feet of lumber—a day.

City in a Bubble
Part 3

Word was getting out about this miracle in the Piney Woods. The locals called it “The Magic City”. Northerners didn’t know what to think about this rumor of “enlightened labor practices” in as unlikely a location as Mississippi. Especially in a lumber camp! These sites were notorious for drunken brawls, knifings and every other kind of unsavory practice that lonely, demoralized men could devise during those interminable stretches in the wild. As one local paper put it, “Life turned in one monotonous round of sawdust, fleas, hard labor, beer and mean living.”

No, the Northerners figured, it had to be a hoax.

In 1912, the Atlantic Monthly decided to expose the truth and dispatched a reporter to Laurel. And to make the story even more dramatic, they sent a woman. She admitted to coming with very low expectations, probably just hoping to get out alive.

She wasn’t much comforted when on the way down, a fellow passenger assured her that all the talk about hookworm in the South was just a conspiracy to keep Northern capital away. It wasn’t nearly that bad. Nor was she thrilled when she arrived in Laurel and saw the “fields of blackened and ragged stumps.” Or when the yellow cow ambled down the sidewalk toward her searching, she believed, for something to chew on.

But gradually it dawned on her. She came to believe that she has discovered “one of the most remarkable communities in the New South.” Of course she was rightly impressed with the modernity of the equipment. Steam-skidders capable of hauling trees from a thousand feet away to the track, widening the circumference of available timber. And she noted the new steam-powered loaders that lifted the immense logs and set them onto the waiting cars.

But that wasn’t what astounded her. Her estimation of Laurel soared when she saw how else those steam-loaders were being employed. Not only were the giant machines lifting and removing logs from the cars, they were also being used to lift and remove pre-fabricated housing units. Our Yankees had devised a way for the usual crew of four hundred workers to take their homes with them every time they changed camp. And since they could have homes, they could have families. Our Yankees had done the impossible. They had transformed vicious, depressing, uncivilized logging-camps into pleasant moveable villages, complete with wives and children and schools and churches. There were fully staffed hospitals, vegetable and flower gardens, an electrical generating plant and YMCA’s with baths. There was even a company store that sold goods at market prices. The little villages had their own constables and aldermen and school boards, all made up of the laborers, not the managers.

To top it all, the woman reporter discovered that Negroes were included in the deal. They too were provided with schools and churches, houses and health care, just as were the whites. Of course the blacks homes and white homes were located on opposite ends of the lane, nor did the races mix in school or church. That was State law. But she could see right off these Yankees had a knack for pushing the prevailing system of segregation as far as they were legally allowed to.

And nobody seemed upset about it. Where was the Mississippi she had heard about back in Boston? This was truly an empire in a bubble.

But her amazement didn’t end there. She discovered the Yankees were not interested in forcing their workers into financial bondage as a way of shackling them to the company store. On the contrary, they paid their workers weekly in cash so they wouldn’t have to rely on credit, and actually encouraged them to buy cut over land and build their own homes and become responsible citizens.

And education? At that time Mississippi was spending an average of $6.17 per white pupil. Laurel spent $20. While Mississippi spent next to nothing on the few existing blacks schools, and seemed set on burning those down, Laurel was not only constructing them, but also liberally funding them. Laurel schools, in 1912, were already acknowledged as best in the State.

What the reporter took away from her visit was very insightful. She said it boiled down to this: Every business decision these Yankee lumbermen made uplifted the character of the worker. And every decision made to uplift the character of the worker, served the interests of the business.

These folks were truly a hundred years ahead of their time.

Who could have guessed that this backward, obstinate people of Jones County, written off by most as too crude and primitive to be educable, could have responded in such a whole-hearted way to a fair chance to raise themselves up in the world?

City in a Bubble
Part 4

Word was out. By the turn of the century men looking for fair pay, decent employment and a little respect found their way to Laurel. The school system attracted families from all over and new businesses sprang up, included three more sawmills. First-generation free blacks, whose only option had been to place themselves back into bondage under the sharecropping system, came for the chance of being treated like human beings and they gave rise to the first group of middleclass blacks in Mississippi, some say the South.

Blacks came as laborers, were made foremen, became property owners, branched out as entrepreneurs, barbers, jitney drivers. Black doctors, dentists, and lawyers arrived to cater profitably to their own. Front Street grew into an unbroken string of black-owned businesses and professionals. They exhibited a sense of upward mobility found nowhere else in the South. According to a northern paper, “By the 1920’s Laurel’s black population evoked a confidence and culture that paralleled the socioeconomic ascension and development of many northeastern black communities.”

Mrs. Catherine Gardiner had been busy as well. She hit upon an idea that would leave as deep an imprint upon Laurel as her husband’s business practices had. A well traveled woman, she was aware of the revolutionary thinking taking hold in cities like Chicago, Detroit and Washington D.C. It was called the City Beautiful Movement.

Briefly, this concept espoused that you could develop the character of citizens and inspire civic virtue by creating a beautiful city environment made up of extraordinary and exquisite structures, landscapes and thoroughfares. Mind you this had only been embraced in major cities with populations in the hundreds of thousands if not millions. Laurel was a speck on the map in1900 with only a few thousand people. But that didn’t dampen Mrs. Gardiner’s grandiose visions. She got busy and began advocating. By 1902 there were regular editorial pleas to make Laurel, “City Beautiful.”

Tiny Laurel with its pig trails and rutted tracks, sitting on the edge of the Tallahala Swamp, almost overnight became a city of broad boulevards, lined with oak saplings, as if planted to demonstrate Mrs. Gardiner’s faith in the magnificence of her vision.

But just as they had to work within the segregation laws of the day, they also understood the need to conform to certain class distinctions. These were respectfully observed in the layout of the city grid. Each level of society got its own street. Just as New York’s Fifth Avenue was a symbol of wealth, Laurel was to have its own majestic Fifth Avenue. On this street the lumber barons and their families erected mansions as stately as those of the antebellum planters. Fourth Avenue was reserved for managers. Third was for mill foreman. Second and First were for mill workers and their families. Merchants got 6th and 7th.

Class and industry were in perfect balance.

Between 1903 and 192O magnificent structures appeared like Imperial Faberge eggs, each one outdoing the next in elegance and uniqueness. There were the splendid Georgian, Jeffersonian Revival, Classical Revival mansions built by the barons. The merchants erected their Queen Anne, Colonial Revival, and Mediterranean style homes. The Episcopal Church on 5th Avenue was Romanesque Revival and later a neo-gothic Presbyterian Church was designed by the office of Rathbone De Buys and erected across the street. There was a Beaux-Arts Courthouse and a City Hall in the Craftsman-Prairie Style inspired by Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. All of this was within a three-block area!

In addition, the lumber company’s headquarters was now an opulent Italianate mansion copied from a Roman villa built in the 1540’s. In all, three hundred and fifty buildings, private, commercial and public, went up in bold classical revival styles. The town never had much over a population of 20,000 people, yet boasted the finest collection of collection of late 19th and early 20th century revival architecture in the South.

In line with the City Beautiful philosophy, Mrs. Gardiner wanted to turn some of the city’s cutover lands into public parks. Well, why not hire the best? The family engaged the firm of Fredrick Law Olmstead to landscape a city parkway system for tiny Laurel. Olmstead, by the way, was known as the “father of American Architecture”, having designed the country’s first public spaces such as New York City’s Central Park and the grounds surrounding the U. S. Capitol. Laurel was soon declared by the National Recreation Association as having the best park system of any small town in America. In 1912, Laurel became the smallest town in America to receive a YWCA charter.

Since the University of Chicago was the world epicenter for education philosophy, theory and practice, the Gardiners sent their pick for school superintendent, R.H. Watkins, there to learn the most progressive educational methods of the day and apply them to the local school system. Laurel schools were the first in the South to pay teachers year-round and to subsidize their advanced training. Any Laurel High School graduate was accepted into the University of Chicago without taking an entrance exam.

And naturally in those days when you thought of golf courses, you immediately thought of Scotland. So Seymour Dunn, the famous Scottish golfer and noted designer, was dispatched to personally lay out the local golf course. Professional golfers of the day swore it was the best 18-hole course in the nation.
In 1921, at the age of only 23, Catherine’s grandnephew died, leaving no living male heir to the family. As his memorial, the families retained the services of the famed architect Rathbone deBuys to design a Georgian Revival mansion for the purpose of housing a public library, museum, and art gallery. “Contributions from the private collections of the founding families formed the original collection. The first donation was an assortment of 494 Native American baskets, collected by Catherine Marshall Gardiner herself on her extensive travels. The families donated important 19th and 20th century paintings, volumes of books, rare Japanese woodblock prints. One hour in that magnificent temple, located in the poorest State in the nation, could expand a child’s horizons and change his life forever.

Remember, we are still in the early 1900’s Mississippi, the State known for hookworm, pellagra, race-baiting and rampant illiteracy. I can only imagine what these world-renowned designers, architects, engineers and artists from NY, Chicago, New Orleans, and Europe could have been thinking as their train pushed deeper and deeper into backwoods America, past dirt-road depots, shanty towns and falling down tenement shacks, hollow-eyed children, doomed to ignorance, void of any sign of culture and grace, and then at last coming upon those acres upon acres of blackened tree trunks and howling wasteland; only to be met at the Laurel station by Yankees with open checkbooks and grandiose visions of Athens in a bubble.

City in a Bubble
Part 5

Of course there were plenty of times our Yankees had to put aside their noble illusions and bow to public sentiment for the sake of keeping peace in a community as racially, socially and culturally diverse as Laurel. Like in 1911 when the town decided it wanted to erect a Confederate monument, partly to dispel those nasty rumors about Jones County being anything less than loyal to the Lost Cause. There were still a lot of people around who told stories of Jones County actually seceding from Mississippi to avoid that Glorious War. Any remaining ambiguity as to Civil War loyalties needed to be silenced.
Our Yankee, Mr. George S. Gardiner, was asked to contribute a large portion of the funding to the grand marble monument. It was probably worth it to him just to be able to fire off the following quip. “You see there a handsome monument erected with Yankee money to the Confederate dead of the Free State of Jones which seceded from the Confederacy after the Confederacy seceded from the Union.”

There was no doubt he understood the fault lines on which his city was built.

His wife was also the victim of cultural stumbling blocks. With the best of intentions she decided to begin a woman’s sewing club. This group would meet, share aspirations for the emerging city, at the same time producing clothing that could benefit charity. Unfortunately Mrs. Gardiner never thought to check the church affiliations of the other ladies. But a visiting Baptist preacher did. He condemned the good Baptists in the group for co-mingling their funds with heretical Episcopalians, Presbyterians and Methodists. Other arrangements had to be made.

More surprising though, was how few clashes arose over how Our Yankees’ dealt with the race issue. In most of Mississippi, things had only gotten worse for blacks since Vardaman. Jim Crow was the rule and blacks were increasingly shackled to a tenet farm system called sharecropping which seemed to be designed to put them deeper into debt each year. In 1916 Theodore G. Bilbo was elected governor and proposed a solution to the “race problem”. “I’m the best friend the nigger’s got in the state of Mississippi,” Bilbo declared. “I’m trying to do something for ‘em. I want to send ‘em back to Africa where they belong.”

That period was tragic for blacks all over. It seemed everywhere African Americans were able to compete in the workforce to create a middle-class, whites instigated a race riot to level the community.

In 1917 East St. Louis erupted in riots precipitated by labor conflicts. White rioters killed hundreds of black residents, many of whom were women and children.

The Chicago Riots of 1919 grew out of tensions on the Southside, where Irish descendants and African Americans competed for jobs at the stockyards. That was the same year as the Omaha Riots.

The Tulsa race riot, also known as the 1921 Race Riot, was a massacre confined mainly to the black neighborhood of Greenwood. The Greenwood section was home to a commercial district so prosperous it was known as “the Negro Wall Street.” During the 16 hours of rioting 800 people were admitted to local hospitals with injuries, an estimated 10,000 were left homeless, 35 city blocks composed of 1,256 residences were destroyed by fire. 300 blacks killed, 10 whites.

1923 saw the Rosewood Massacre in Florida, in which over several days, white mobs attacked and killed blacks, and burned most of the buildings in that prosperous black settlement. It was abandoned by residents during the attacks and was not reoccupied.

According to a period analysis of the events, there were 26 separate riots in communities and cities across the United States where blacks were the victims of physical attacks.

Then why not Laurel, with its conspicuous black middle-class located in the most racially explosive state in the Nation?

An eastern reporter in 1912 explained the good relations between blacks and whites this way. “In general, race troubles seem to arise where the poor whites are ignorant and inefficient, and so have some reason to fear competition.” But the writer went on to say Laurel whites were “absolutely opposite…responding to any opportunity for education and self-help.” Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner’s plans to build character into the nature of the work as well into the fabric of city life seemed to be paying off handsomely.

It allowed Mrs. Gardiner to push the envelope even further. When Mrs. Gardiner read an article in the New York Sun about the state of Negro education, she called on Laurel’s city officials to ascertain the local government’s commitment to black education. After learning that black school children received one quarter of the funding appropriated to white education, she was outraged. She spearheaded the building of new schools for blacks. She started off by contributing $10,000 and challenging both the city and the black community to match it. They did, creating a unified effort, ingeniously bridging cultural, class and race divides.

At that time in Mississippi, most of the African Americans didn’t even have a high school to attend, even if they could afford that luxury. Eighth grade was considered education enough for blacks. But Mrs. Gardiner was always one to think on a monumental scale. She began conspiring on how to pattern a school, right here in Laurel, after the celebrated Tuskegee Institute. Except where Booker T. Washington was clear that he was not preparing his students to compete for “white jobs,” Mrs. Gardiner had no such reservations.

In 1928, Oak Park Vocational High School opened its doors, attracting and paying for the best black teaching talent from around the country. Under the label “vocational” it became the center of a conspiracy that operated under the radar of Jim Crow. The school was shaped to a large degree by a proud, strong-willed black middle-class, unwilling to let segregation and discrimination deprive their children of a splendid future. Their “vocational school” conspiracy launched surgeons, lawyers, political scientists, college professors, star athletes, Army generals, concert pianists, and yes, operatic superstars.

Oak Park was one of the few black schools in the South that when it closed its doors in order to integrate into the white schools, the community felt like they might be coming-down in the world.

City in a Bubble
Part 6

The 1920’s were Laurel’s heyday. The founders were obsessed with civic responsibility, cultural development, and industrial growth, infusing the community with art, traveling theaters, Chautauqua lectures, books, and jobs. Laurel claimed more millionaires per capita than any city in the nation. It was the best in paternalism.

Things looked like they could stay this way forever, if only the trees hadn’t given out. There were four milling operations now in Laurel, which had become known as the yellow pine capital of the world. But the State, which always loved the Yankee’s money but never cared much for them personally, had made it cost-prohibitive to engage in reforestation. The lands were depleted. And of course there was the depression. Even the city in the bubble wasn’t immune from that. That’s when cracks began to appear in foundation.

As the barons became less of a force economically, their social and cultural clout also began to decline. It became harder to hold the disparate elements of class and race, to cause the lions lay down with the sheep. The day was soon approaching when they would no longer be able to keep their City Beautiful safe in its bubble.

But to their credit, even as their influence waned, they were able to bequeath new life to their child. With the forests playing out, one thing they had plenty of sawdust. The families had the to foresight to send off for Thomas Alva Edison’s chief engineer, (again, why not the best?) and charged the young man to come up with a use for the mountains of waste. By a combination of science and accident he hit upon a revolutionary invention—artificial wood. His name was Mason, and he named the product after himself, Masonite. The company grew into an industrial behemoth that would carry the city forward fiscally, long after the barons were gone.

Our Yankees, a people who had come in like clouds, were in retreat. The children no longer graduated from local schools. They went to prestigious Eastern colleges. The women traveled in the glamorous circles of big city life. They kept luxurious apartments on NY’s Upper East Side or townhouses in Georgetown. The men took jobs on Wall Street. They played golf with Eisenhower and became involved in international intrigues. A grandson of Mrs. Gardiner began what was to become the CIA. They say he was the one who dubbed it “The Might Wurlitzer.” They were citizens of the world now.

Even Mrs. Gardiner, now widowed, seemed to be losing her relevance in the face of an encroaching world. She spent much of her time traveling from continent to continent, collecting baskets and other exotic artifacts. It was not uncommon to find this type of peculiar item in the local paper.

Mrs. George Gardiner, recently returned from another tour of the world, has made a gift of 24 new baskets, two grass skirts from New Zealand, a poi that a new Zealand girl would wear on her head and few other strange and interesting bits she has picked up, here and there, in her sojourn in the Malay Archipelago. Laurel Leader Call, 1935.

Their temples still stood. Mrs. Gardiner’s seedlings grew into majestic oaks. Each year by tradition third-graders trooped through the art museum to see the second smallest basket in the world and the medieval suit of armor and Samurai swords. They were told the story about the poor rich boy who died young in 1921 and had his honeymoon house rebuilt into this glorious institution. The founding families began to take on the aura of an ancient race of giants.
Their names were still on the streets and etched into the stone lentils of the buildings, but they themselves have dimmed. William Mason moved into his mansion not on 5th Avenue with the barons, but on 6th with the merchants. He was a scientist and entrepreneur, not a molder of character and community. Besides, Laurel was now too industrially diverse and too much a part of the global market to be shaped by one family’s dream, no matter how benevolent. The “real world” had arrived.

As one pragmatic white Laurelite put it in 1950, “Laurel has had too many things handed to her on a silver platter. We’re suffering a terrific hangover from benevolent paternalism. There’s a death struggle to keep up public institutions which were endowed privately, now that the endowments are no longer adequate. We’re used to having poppa foot the bill.”

What the founding families saw as necessities for shaping the kind of character and civic virtue that could hold a community together across culture, class and race, was now viewed by many as an unwelcome tax burden. The community that had been built upon fault lines was about to shake apart. The storm clouds were gathering.

Soon, a remarkable convergence of events, all occurring within a span of a few years, would focus the world’s attention on the proud city of Laurel, Mississippi.

• In 1942 a mob will take a black prisoner, Howard Wash, from the courthouse jail and hang him, furnishing Laurel with its first lynching.
• In 1945 Willie McGee will begin his five-year and widely covered ordeal ending in the electric chair.
• In 1948 a “white negro” named Davis Knight, who can trace his lineage to the infamous Newt Knight, marries a white woman and is taken to court in Jones   County for miscegenation.
• In 1951 while he watches a lynch mob spontaneously organize to “take care of” a convicted black rapist, a successful Laurel business owner named Sam          Bowers is inspired to begin a new kind of Klan, one more vicious and secretive than any before. He would go on to plot the most horrific murders of the Civil    Rights Era.

But without our Yankees to shield us, the contradictions that had never really resolved themselves would be laid bare. Many proud Laurelites treated the unpleasant episodes with embarrassed silence and stood united in their denial, hoping that these unpleasant episodes would quickly be forgotten. They hid behind their reputation as a progressive Southern city. Yet this consensual silence and turning of a blind eye, left the door open to those few who believed in mob violence as a way of dealing with threats. In the harsh glare of the international spotlight we would often be made to appear backwards and grotesque and vicious. It’s something many of us have not gotten over.

Perhaps we can find solace, as well as pride, in knowing that at one time we were part of something extraordinary, an experiment the likes of which the country had never seen.

Today more than ever, Laurel has lessons to teach. Examining the present state of affairs in the country with open antagonism between the so-called ruling elite and the common man, with the battling agendas of whites, blacks, Hispanics and others, the often debilitating distrust among ownership and management and labor, with the increasing reluctance of taxpayers to fund public works, it is inspiring to know that there once was a progressive little city in Mississippi with civic virtue and decency of character enough to bridge what must have seemed like impossible chasms, to go against prevailing wisdom and social custom, and bring forth a pragmatic vision based on the common good of all its citizens.