Comby Saw Mill and The Piney Woods School

As a MDAH volunteer, one of my assignments was to write scripts for potential historical reenactors based on historic documents.

John R. Webster (Early Supporter)
Mississippian, The Piney Woods School

Time period: Early 20th Century
Prop/pantomine options: A man of wealth.
Descriptors: White male, Age 50s-60s

I became involved with The Piney Woods School very early on when one morning this young Negro walked into my sawmill office and introduced himself as Laurence C. Jones. He spoke fast, compared with us Southern folks, and with well-chosen words. He outlined his plan for starting a school for colored people, and said he wanted the consent of the white people of the community and wanted my view of the matter. I told him I could not advise him favorably, for we white people were not able to educate ourselves, let alone the Negro. Our schools were kept up by taxation. The Negroes didn’t have much property to pay taxes on, so we didn’t think they were entitled to schools. I told him I thought it would be an uphill piece of business to establish a tuition school as the Negroes would be unable to pay anything. I thought he had in mind a school supported by taxes and tuition, never having known of other kind. 

He related to me that Mr. Ed Taylor, a local well-respected Negro man of some property who you might know as ‘Uncle Ed’, told him that if he could get the school going he would deed him the Old Montague Harris place as a location for the school. 

Now here’s where I broke into his speech to do a little talking myself. I said, “Young fellow, I think you are taking too much for granted. Even if Uncle Ed gave you that land, you would not have a school. You couldn’t use a shed that the sheep and goats have been occupying, and what we white people could, or would, help would be of no benefit to you, for we are sadly behind in education for ourselves, and, as I told you before, we are not paying out much of anything to educate the Nigger. And personally, I told him, I was more in sawmilling than education.

At that time, nearly every man in the country, including merchants and farmers, was getting in some way money out of the sawmill. Naturally, I would have some influence in the community. Besides, I wasn’t one of “them furiners” some of whom were driftin’ in. I was a native product of Mississippi. I was employing both Negro and White Labor on the same terms; most of them boys I had been raised with.

Jones stressed the point that this was not to be a book larnin’ school, but he was going to teach how to work on the farm, and to build fences, gates, water gaps, sharpen plows, work with cows and hogs, etc. This was the type of school that was pleasing to the people and Jones was capitalizing on our human weakness to want to be consulted about things. It enhances our self-respect and satisfies our ego, and further there was to be a way to get more and better work out of a Negro.

Let me say here that this working or industrial agricultural school was the only kind that could have been established here at that time, for a book larnin’ school for the Negroes would have gotten no local white support whatever, and Jones would have aroused prejudices that would have been fatal, for a Negro wasn’t supposed to read and write and especially how to figger. If his name was wanted for legal purposes, he made his cross mark.

I spoke plainly to Jones and said that he had more guts and determination than any man I ever saw. So I put my trust in his perseverance and integrity to the end, and gave him ten thousand feet of lumber for that school, and granted him credit as he needed it from time to time.

With time, Jones had gotten the money to buy an adjoining farm -- the Bob Hemphill place. He built a dormitory and brought in some teachers. In fact, he was our very best neighbor. He would send his students to help some sick family with their crop, or to help in the house if there was a new baby or a death in the family. Jones would send his choir out to sing for aged people who could not go to church, or he would furnish his own conveyance to carry them, and he would serenade them with his band, and go out and sing Christmas Carols at Yuletide.

Why shouldn’t a man like this have the esteem of Southern white men, even though he might be prejudiced against the Negro?