Prosaic Templar

First of all, the kid in the stock photo on the afore-linked site is holding is a TROUT! They don’t show up much in ponds ‘round here. There’s some opposition to this development from the local residents-one big part NIMBY, one part “why mess up the place?”:

http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/clarionledger/access/1839439241.html?FMT=ABS&date=Aug+21,+2009

I find the developer’s website odd in that they emphasize the historic nature of the site that they’re about to mostly destroy. Oh, and it may or may not have been the site of a slave uprising, but that’s not mentioned on their website. The following is an excerpt from page 21 of a 2002 report written by Glyn Duvall for MDOT prior to road improvements near the old town site:

The town is infamous for a “slave insurrection” allegedly started by the pirate John A. Murrell and the consequent lynching which occurred on the town square in 1835 (Mead 1987). Murrell was dubbed the “Great Western land Pirate” due to his crime of selling an African-American co-conspirator and then stealing him back only to sell him to someone else. Conflicting reports claim that for his crimes Murrell was sentenced to ten years in jail orwas hung in Livingston (Mead 1987, Baldwin 2002).
Virgil A. Stewart, the man who captured Murrell, claimed that the ‘pirate’ had begun a conspiracy with 1000 slaves to attack all the white people of the region on Christmas Day 1835. In early July of that year several suspected African-American ‘conspirators’ were lynched in Livingston along side of two white men. One of these white men confessed during ‘questioning’ that he and the others were part of an insurrection involving all the slaves from Maryland to Louisiana which would result in the “complete destruction of the white population of all the slave states”(Mead 1987}. His confession and numerous others from victims that July were reportedly acquired through torture. John Murrell’s exploitation of slave dealers and Stewart’s account of an imaginary insurrection resulted in the public execution of twelve white men and an indeterminate but higher number of African-American men (Dunbar 1976). There is no explanation why there isn’t a precise count of enslaved African-American men executed in Livingston in July 1835. Notably, this incident is reported in only one of the five detailed histories of Livingston and Madison County. This event remains controversial. Posey writes in his history of Flora that “Innocent lives may have been taken but innocent lives may have been saved … “(Posey 2002: 137)

The sources cited in the text are:

Rowland, Dunbar. History of Mississippi: The Heart of the South. 4 vols. Chicago: S. J. Clarke Publishing Co., 1925.

Mead, Carol Lynn. The Land Between the Rivers: Madison County, Mississippi. Friends of the Madison County Library, Canton, Mississippi, 1987.

Posey, Henry Presley. The Flora book : a history of the town of Flora and southwest Madison County, Mississippi.
Flora, Miss. : First Street Pub., 2002.

Baldwin—not listed in bibliography.