Twenty-plus years of documenting the South's vernacular art, visionary environments and traditions….plus modern art exhibits, Faulkner and Eudora, and This Week's Various. Welcome.
Pie meringue almost always comes out either one of two ways: really good, or just white stuff on top of a pie. The Crystal Grill‘s pies (incl. the meringue) are *always* great.
While we were in Greenwood this time, we took these pics:
I had the coconut pie:
Av had the chocolate:
Giardina’s is now open on Mondays – so while we were there this last week, we took some pics (Giardina’s is right next to the Alluvian Hotel – so if you’re a guest at the hotel, you don’t even have to walk outside to get to it).
This is the view from inside the curtained booth. BTW, if it’s important to you to eat in one of the curtained areas, be sure to tell them when you make the reservation so there’s no chance that you’ll be put in the dining room at the end of the hallway if they’re busy (the dining room isn’t bad at all – but why not get the full experience?).
The booths all feature buzzers, so if you need the waiter, you can just ring for him. Our waiter seemed pretty talkative (but he kept calling us ‘guys’ – I heard him doing it with the table next to ours, too…..and this is just a peeve of mine or whatever….but when you’re somewhere you’ve gotten dressed up to go and you’re going to spend real money….I just think people shouldn’t be called ‘guys’. At Burger King, okay – but not somewhere nice.). I asked him what percentage of people actually used it (of every time we’ve been to Lusco’s or Giardina’s, I think we may have used it one time). He said that about 30% of tables will use it, and went on to say it was usually rich women who didn’t work that really liked to wear it out.
Anyway.
…as you can see, it’s nice and dark….
Behind that chair, the button:
My mint julep:
Here’s a pic of my bloody mary. It’s nice, and they put fresh pepper on top to give it a little bit of a bite:
This is Av’s gumbo, which I’m not sure qualifies in my book as gumbo. There was no detectable okra and no rice at all….
These were the tamales we had as as an appetizer:
I had the linguine pasta with basil pesto cream sauce. Very good…
Av had the whole broiled pompano. Nice….
…and for the sides, we chose the garlic mashed potatoes and the ricotta spinach (very, very good).
This is a pic of Lusco’s, which we like a little bit better than Giardina’s. They aren’t open Sundays or Mondays, so we didn’t get to go this time – but when we’re back in Greenwood in December, we’ll be there!
We had a really nice lunch at Airport Grocery in Cleveland. I’ve been wanting us to visit since I got the cd of Willie Foster playing there in 2000, I think.
Hot tamales were pretty good:
We both had hamburgers – Av thought they were excellent. Everything was good, but I think the potato salad was the icky Sysco brand. Overall, a really good lunch spot though.
More Indian mounds!
This one is Barbee Cemetery, in Coahoma County, on Highway 61:
This is the Leatherman Home in Commerce (when you take the road to the Hollywood Casino and Sam’s Town off Hwy 61, this is on the righthand side of the road. I bet people pass this all the time and have no idea!) which is situated on the side of a mound:
My WPA book says that this was a plantation with the big house built on the slope of an Indian mound. The land was bought from the Chickasaw, and the builder of the house was unwilling to desecrate a mound ‘full of the dead.’ The legend is that Hernando De Soto had his first look at the Mississippi River from atop this mound in 1541. You can’t see the river from here now because of the trees and the levee.
This was our first time to stay at the hotel at the Horseshoe Casino Hotel in Tunica.
When I made the reservation for the room two or three days before we arrived, I requested a room with one king bed on a higher floor. When the online request form asked if we would like to have a room with a view, I checked on that too. When we checked in (on a Sunday afternoon, so they were nowhere close to capacity) we were told all they had were rooms with the smaller beds and we wound up on the third floor – with a view of the rooms on the other side of the U-shape! The person that checked us in seemed liked she was having a bad day before we even walked up, so we just said “okay” and took it. We were only staying one night so I didn’t feel like pursuing it.
The room was okay – average size, average furnishings. Since we stayed on a Sunday, we got the room for well less than $100 – but I wouldn’t have paid any more for it for a Friday or Saturday stay. The Sheraton Casino Hotel rooms (next door to the Horseshoe) are *much* nicer.
All in all, it was okay. What was absolutely wonderful was that we won a few hundred dollars downstairs in the casino and our meals were comped! Yay! We’re not big gamblers ever – we go with the intention to spend some time as a diversion and lose a maximum of $100 – but when we start winning, we just keep bumping up the amount at which when we get down to that we’ll leave. Anyway, we had a really great time, and the amount we won paid for most of our trip. Nice!
The historic marker at the turn for what was the Doro Plantation at Beulah says:
Doro Plantation
On land received as payment of legal fees in the 1840s. Doro Plantation was established in the early 1850s by Charles Clark, Confederate General and wartime Governor of Mississippi (1863-1865). Doro continued to thrive in the post-Civil War years. Gov. Clark and members of the Clark and Jacobs families are buried here.
Doro Plantation was in what’s now called Old Prentiss. It was the county seat of Bolivar County from 1852 to 1863, when it was burned by Federals. It fell into the river in 1865 and was uncovered in the drought of 1954 (the Clark’s house had to be moved before the war because the site was falling into the river. The house doesn’t exist today.).
The cemetery where General Clark is buried with his family is on top of an Indian mound.
General Clark’s monument in the cemetery.
This is a pic of the old J.C. Burrus House, called Hollywood Plantation. It’s the only antebellum structure in Bolivar County and is constructed of heart cypress. Today it’s better known as the Baby Doll House because it was the setting for the 1956 movie Baby Doll, which is based on Tennessee Williams’ 1946 play, Twenty-seven Loads of Cotton.
I’ve read that the reason it survived the war is because Judge Burrus knew the invading Federal officer while he attended UVA. It was also used as a Confederate hospital and headquarters for Confederate officers including General Jubal Early.
John Wilkes Booth is also said to have lived here for about ten days after shooting President Lincoln.
When the filmmakers for Baby Doll came out to Benoit, they promised the home’s then-owners that in lieu of a fee for shooting, they would make some renovations to the home. Years later, people would come out to the house and actually take pieces of the house as souvenirs from the movie. Not nice.
Now the home looks really terrible. There are people that live in the side yard of the house, but I didn’t get out to chat with them or anything. I read that the home was given to the Bolivar County Historical Society in 1974 by the Burrus family but it doesn’t look as though much is being done.
The home was placed on the 2001 list of endangered places by the Mississippi Heritage Trust. Hopefully someone will take more of an interest in it and preserve the house as it has so much history attached to it.
Delta and Pine Land Company (D and PL for short) is in Scott, MS. D and PL is a breeder, producer, and marketer of cotton seed and soybean seed for use here in the US and overseas. They produce the “Roundup Ready” cotton seeds that Av and I have used in the tiny area we grow cotton in.
My WPA book (the Works Progress Administration’s division, the Federal Writers’ Project, wrote guides in the ’30s on each of the states – I have the WPA book for Alabama and one for Mississippi (I’d like to have all of them) and they are fascinating looks at how things were then) says this about Scott and the D and PL:
At Scott, 67.4 m. (140 alt., 300 pop.) are the headquarters of the Delta and Pine Land Co. Plantation, the country’s largest plantation, containing 38,000 acres, 11700 are in cotton; the whole is under the supervision of 12 unit managers, and is worked by 1000 black sharecroppers. The value of the property is about $5,000,000.
The company maintains a school, church, and hospital for tenants, the croppers paying a $.75-per-acre hospital fee annually – thus a man who worked 12 acres would be assessed $9 a year for hospitalization. Women are encouraged to go to the hospital for confinement rather than to depend upon midwives. Vaccination for small-pox and typhoid, inoculations against malaria, and anti-syphilitic injections are offered as part of the medical service. Tenant cabins, unscreened but stoutly built, are above the Delta average in quality. The tenants eat the usual pork, molasses, and cornbread, but an attempt is made to make up vitamin deficiencies by supplying them with free yeast. It is estimated that the average tenant here clears about $300 a year above subsistence.
Oscar Johnston, a native Mississippian, took over the management of the company in 1928; since then the plantation has shown a notable profit for the first time since its establishment in 1910. Johnston was in 1933 Finance Director of the AAA, and later manager of the Federal cotton pool.
The road leading from State 1 to the Scott railway station is an experiment made to find new uses for cotton. A heavy coat of tar was applied to the old graveled roadbed, over this was laid cotton fabric, and this in turn was overlaid with an asphalt coating. Theoretically, the cotton mesh absorbs moisture, thus lessening the amount of expansion and contractions of the roadbed caused by changes in temperature. These changes are in some part responsible for cracks in paving. The half-mile cotton textile road was built in 1935.
Below are pics leading up to the Delta and Pine Land Company in Scott. This is the season when the cotton modules are going in and everything is ginned.
Gino’s Hamburgers in Greenville: I noticed that they were voted one of the favorite hamburgers in the Delta, in the last ‘favorites’ issues of Delta Magazine (which is great, I subscribe).
This is the #2 hamburger, with chili on top and slaw beneath. Pretty good. Fries are just okay.
Av and I got back over to Doe’s Eat Place (the original) in Greenville – and I took lots of pics:
Aunt Florence seated us – she’s *always* there. This time we sat in the back – we got there early (about 5:30pm) because we had to be at something later that night. BTW, they open earlier in the day for people to come by and get tamales.
The interior is all oilcloth tablecloths, framed magazine and newspaper articles about Doe’s, football posters, and seed sacks.
The fries on cooking on the stove. They’re cooked the right way – in big cast iron skillets.
Above: the middle room is where the salads and fries are made.
Here’s the salad – the dressing is just fresh-squeezed lemons and olive oil. Yum!
We *of course* had to get a small order of tamales.
..and we shared this *huge* Porterhouse which we weren’t even able to finish (delish)…our dog Bagel will looove this bone. Also in the picture are Av’s french fries, which are always amazing.
…here’s Doe cooking the steaks. Doe’s daddy (also Doe) started the restaurant.
…in the front room. These are steaks that have just been cut.
Everything, as always, was fantastic!
You must be logged in to post a comment.