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Lost ._________tics
Of Hancock County
Born in
tA
was one
black Hancock County deputies
(Above) Willie Lee became one of the first two black deputies to be sworn into the Hancock County Sheriff’s Department in 1964. He retired in 1992 after an eventful career which included catching a suspected murderer in his own truck while off duty. But that’s another story ....
(Top) Willie Lee at his home in Pearlington. Lee was born at Nancy's Flat near Westonia, in a shotgun house on family land. He married the former Eddie Christmas of Westonia after “stealing” her from under her father’s watchful eye, he said.
BY BENNIE SHALLBETTER Staff Writer
¥ho knows why we remember the things we do. The same thing can happen to Hwo people and each will remember the event in a different way, their own unique way. The people who lived in West Hancock County are no different in the way they remember their communities of Logtown,	Westonia,
Napoleon, Gainesville, Santa Rosa, and other areas, Nancy’s Flat, Bayou LaCroix and more I haven’t yet discovered.
Though their lives intertwined in many ways, each person has a unique memory to share and together they make up the history of these communities that are now lost to us. In many cases individual memories are the only record we will ever have of a way of life that vanished forever when
Wheat is history?
Surely it is more than statistics and dates that are recorded in a book. To many, history is the remembrances of the people who were there and those memories may be as similar or as varied as the people themselves.
For many of the communities that were once in Hancock County, Log Town, Santa Rosa, Gainesville, Napoleon; Stevenson, and Westonia, the • •• '* 1 . memories of the people who 1 were thfere are all we have to remind us of what once was a vital part of local life.
we gave up a ■ third of our county to the federal- government to'build Stennis Space Center., r .
It was a hot day when I went to talk to Pearlington resident Willie Lee, who
retired as a deputy in the Sheriff’s Department in 1992, one of the first two black deputies to be hired in the county. He suggested we sit outside in front of a huge shop fan he had in the yard, on account of he never used his air conditioners, he said. They bother his sinuses, he said, and after his wife of over 40 years, the former Eddie B. . Christmas of Westonia, went to take care of her elderly mother down the street, he stopped using them.
We settled into lawn chairs in front of the breeze.
“I was bom in Logtown in 1926, well really in Nancy’s Flat just across from Westonia,” said Lee. “Nancy’s Flat was just across Hwy. 43- from Westonia, but when the house was built, there was no 43, just a wagon trail, and the houses were built with their backs to the road. All six of us were born'.out
NANCY'S FLAT-4B
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