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Robert G. Scharff
1992. This allows a little over two weeks per chapter plus another three weeks for one entirely new chapter on the turpentine industry, and an additional week to allow for tidying up, including the smoothing out of "recalcitrant chapters" that need extra time and effort,
While the format I use is a rather standard chronological presentation, my approach to writing this history is to place local events within a broader context of state, regional, national, and even international events, rather than simply to recite the events that occurred within the county itself. Although I provide thorough documentation, there will also be a list of additional potential sources of information (I have to stop somewhere, or I'll never get it finished).
Only two other books about this county have been
published. These are Thigpen's Pearl River and Next Door to
Heaven, both published in 1965. They cover only the Pearl
River area along the western border of the county, between
about 1810 and 1920. Thigpen is a wonderful story-teller;
his folksy books are anecdotal, based on interviews with
local people. Chapters are arranged by subject matter or
family history and by locality, while I use a chronological
approach and have simply assembled the information written
by many others. An example of Thigpen's documentation and
dating of events is often expressed in the form, "Bill
Jones, who is 84 years old told me that when he was a boy,
?!
The handwritten notes from the Federal Writers' Project (WPA), also based on personal interviews about 1938, have never been published. The microfilmed handwriting is difficult to read and an edited hard-copy edition would make a good additional project. In addition, there are several brief histories of the county seat, published in commemorative souvenier editions of local newpapers. One of these is Ray Thompson's Bay St. Louis: Its History in a Hurry, which occupies about two newspaper pages. Bay St. Louis published by Bishop Leo Fahey in another of these newspaper's 1942 Golden Jubilee edition, is a very good history of the county's Catholic churches and schools.
Other major sources of information are Greenwell's Twelve Flags, Carter's Territorial Papers of the United States, J.F.H. Claiborne's Mississippi as a Provence, Territory, and State, Hickman's Mississippi Harvest, and Dyer's Along the Gulf. Dozens of other books and Newspaper articles are the source of anwhere between one sentence and several pages, and are therefore also among the forerunners to the book being prepared. Extremely little has previously been published about the center of the county, and none at all about its eastern and northern sections.
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