Ella Reynolds

Ella Poteet was born March 1, 1849 to William and Frances Poteet.  In 1850, they were living in Grand Gulf along with her sisters Julia and Emma. Sister Kate was born three years later.  Ella’s father died, and her mother married William Clark Winters on November 19, 1855.  Frances and her daughters Julia and Emma were living with Winters at Rodney in 1860.  For reasons unknown, Ella does not appear on the census with them.   Also living in Rodney at the time was Joseph Bernard Reynolds, an eighteen year old clerk.  Surely J.B. knew the Winters and met Ella through them. 

After his time serving in the Confederate army, J. B. Reynolds returned home and married Ella Poteet on December 19, 1865.  He was seven years her senior, and she was 16 when they married.  By 1870, the young family had relocated to Vicksburg, where J.B. was working as a druggist, and Ella was keeping house and caring for their two children, Ella Josephine, age 4, named for her parents, and William Bernard, newly born.  Ella’s mother was still living at Rodney; she and Winters had had two daughters, Daisy and Fannie.  Also present in the household was Frances’ daughter Emma and her two children, one of whom she had named Ella in a gesture of sisterly love. 

Tragedy would soon strike the family.  On October 2, 1870, Ella died in Vicksburg.  She was only 21 years old.  Just one month later, baby William was taken.  Daughter Josephine would survive, marry, and thrive.  J.B. would go on to marry again, living in Vicksburg as a grocer.  Ella and her baby lie side by side in the wooded cemetery overlooking what remains of a now almost silent Rodney.

Rodney, Mississippi: A Fire that Never Goes Out, Part II.

Rodney Presbyterian Church

"Today Rodney's Landing wears the cloak of vegetation which has caught up this whole land for the third time, or the fourth, or the hundredth."
---Eudora Welty

In 1864, a sand bar began to form that would have disastrous consequences for Rodney.  By 1870, the river had changed course, moving into a new channel several miles west.  Rodney was literally left high and dry.  The prosperous town was no longer a river port.  The geographic and economic realities quickly took hold.  The river had made Rodney all that it was, and the river could also take it all away.

Alston's Grocery Store

Rodney's fate was sealed when the railroad chose to make its route ten miles to the east.  Isolated and in decline, its very existence began to be in jeopardy.  In the 1930s, the Mississippi state legislature revoked its status a a township.  Since that time, Rodney has been known as a "ghost town."

Mt. Zion Baptist Church

old hotel

During Welty's visits to Rodney, there was still a small number of people who called Rodney home.  Photographer Marion Post Wolcott would capture their images in photographs taken in the 1940s.  Today just a handful of inhabited buildings remain, most of which are used as hunting camps.

Masonic Lodge

Now there is only one accessible route to Rodney, an old road cut deep out of the loess, turning to mud and gravel towards the end.  After passing through dense woods, it is a shock to emerge suddenly into the cleared remains of the town, a surge of light after darkness.  In Welty's time, though most of the original buildings had fallen victim to fire and flood, at least some still remained.  Now there is almost nothing left.  Just the Presbyterian Church, Mt. Zion Baptist Church, the falling down remnants of an old store and gas pump, a hotel, and the old masonic lodge.  A few more contemporary structures exist as hunting camps.  What time did not destroy was warped and ruined by the 2011 Mississippi River flood.  Though no longer directly on the river, Rodney has always been a victim of its raging waters, enduring flood after flood.

The highest ground is located on a rise just beyond the Presbyterian church, where the dead citizens of Rodney make their home.  Welty referred to the cemetery as the roof of the town.  The old burying ground is more forest than anything else.  Swathes of it have caved into the ravine, stones lie broken and askew, and trees swallow some plots whole.  Stumbling upon a wrought iron fence demarcating a long forgotten gravesite, camellias in bloom all around it, eerily summons the past in the midst of the disorder.  People lived and died here once.  They laughed and danced and buried their dead.  Once there was actual noise here, not just stillness and the ache of wind through the trees.  Bulbs forcing their way up through the soil, narcissus planted by someone's careful hand, contrast starkly with the wild landscape and act as a testament for those long gone.  Vines and brush and bramble turn the cemetery to jungle in the spring and summer, and so the lush landscape and rich Mississippi soil take back what they once gave.

Perhaps it is best to let Eudora have the last word on this place that so captured her heart.  Actually the place itself was not the captivator; it was the memory of the place, the vestiges of a time past, that inspired Welty and continues to bring people deep into a clearing in the woods seemingly in the middle of nowhere.  For Rodney is almost nowhere now, except in one's mind.  "Whatever is significant and whatever is tragic in its story live as long as the place does, though they are unseen, and the new life will be built upon these things---regardless of commerce and the way of rivers and roads and other vagrancies."

All photos taken by Katy Shannon, December 2010.

Sources:

"Old Rodney: A Mississippi Ghost Town" by Howard Milcham
Mississippi: Comprising Sketches of Counties, Towns, Events, Institutions, and Persons, Arranged in Cyclopedic Form by Dunbar Rowland
Some Notes on River Country by Eudora Welty