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11 1 GRENADA FARM In the winter of 1932, William F. Winter, just shy of his ninth birthday, boarded a train in Grenada, bound for the state capital. Earlier that day, Winter had left his family’s farm in an isolated section of Grenada County, located in north-central Mississippi, east of the Delta. Winter travelled to Jackson to visit his father, Aylmer Winter, a member of the Mississippi State Senate. During his visit, Winter sat with his father at his Senate desk and listened to the legislative debates, many of which revolved around how the state would respond to the Great Depression that had left the state government deeply in debt. Lawmakers considered and eventually passed a state sales tax, after a contentious three-month debate of the measure that included protests against the tax in the streets of Jackson by distressed, out-of-work people. Following one mass meeting , a group of angry citizens marched to Governor Mike Conner’s office in the State Capitol, and one member of the crowd shouted out: “What are you peckerwoods waiting for? Let’s get that _____ Governor.” Conner calmly walked out of his office and through the threatening crowd untouched, an action that seemed to deflate the mob’s ire. When William Winter returned to the Grenada County farm, he dreamed about becoming a politician one day, perhaps a state senator like his father, or even governor of Mississippi like Conner.1 Winter’s boyhood aspirations would eventually be fulfilled, and his family background and somewhat uncommon experiences growing up in rural Grenada County during the Great Depression would help shape the political path he would follow. The Winters of Grenada County had an impressive pedigree. They could trace their American roots back to the late seventeenth century. Starting Grenada Farm 12 from humble origins in England and Ireland, the Winter ancestors had steadily improved their fortunes by migration to the colony of Maryland and, then in the early nineteenth century, by a second migration to the southwestern cotton frontier. In 1815, William Winter’s great-greatgrandfather , William Hooe Winter, who had married Catherine Stark Washington, a cousin of the first president of the United States, left the mid-Atlantic and relocated to Williamson County, Tennessee, south of Nashville. The couple had a growing family and ten black slaves. A year later, William claimed that he was “very much attached to the situation that I have bought,” and he told his mother that “I am in hopes I am settled for life.” Yet, within two years, the Winters had moved again, this time joining the rush of white settlers who headed to north Alabama to try to secure part of the new cotton lands recently taken from the Creek Indians and made available at public auction. In January 1819 William Winter observed the “cotton fever” that gripped north Alabama and noted that new arrivals from the Carolinas, Georgia, Kentucky, and Tennessee were “flocking” to the area “like blackbirds to a corn field.” He advised anyone back east who thought of moving west “to make haste & bring with them Negroes to cultivate.” Winter purchased some of the valuable lands, and the family, which eventually included fourteen children, settled in Tuscumbia, west of Huntsville. The Winters prospered and became one of the leading families in the area. In 1823, William Winter built a large home in Tuscumbia—Locust Hill—which still stands today.2 New lands even further west beckoned to the next generation of Winters . In the late 1830s, William Hooe Winter Jr., accompanied by twelve black slaves, relocated to Hinds County, Mississippi, near the capital of Jackson, where he farmed and also taught school. Around 1840, he moved north to Yalobusha County and acquired part of the land recently appropriated from the Choctaw Indians by the federal government under the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek. Within a few years, he had developed a successful cotton plantation on the lush bottomlands of the Yalobusha River, ten miles west of the town of Grenada. By 1850, forty slaves worked the property, and in 1860, sixty-six slaves lived in fifteen cabins on the twothousand -acre farm. An overseer, Lewis Key, handled slave management, and in 1860 the plantation produced 267 bales of cotton as well as 4,000 bushels of corn. In addition to the extensive cotton plantation on the Yalobusha River, William Winter also acquired land in a number of nearby [3.135.205.146] Project MUSE (2024...

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