Borroum's Drug Store and Soda Fountain

Borroum's Drug Store and Soda Fountain is the oldest continuously operating pharmacy in Mississippi. It was opened in 1865 by former Confederate Army surgeon A.J. Borroum, and moved to its current location in 1873. We found Borroum's somewhat by accident—after visiting the Coon Dog Cemetery in Alabama, we were driving back to Memphis and decided to stop for lunch in Corinth. 

Borroum's is still an operating pharmacy in addition to having a soda fountain and a large collection of antiques on display. They're famous for their Slugburgers—a mixture of pork or beef and extender (mostly soymeal), flattened into a disk and fried—which were invented in Corinth. As inviting as a sack of mystery meat sliders sounds, I opted for my diner lunch staple: a BLT and a chocolate milkshake, with zero regrets. 

As delicious as the food was, the atmosphere of Borroum's is the main draw. The store has been in the Borroum family since it opened, and it's currently owned by Camille Borroum-Mitchell, great-granddaughter of the founding doctor. Camille started working in the store when she was about 14, washing dishes. After she became the University of Mississippi’s first female pharmacy graduate, she moved to the pharmacy and her son and daughter-in-law operate the soda fountain.

Borroum's collection of antique medicine bottles reminded me of the Pharmacy Museum in New Orleans. I will forever love the typography and design of old things—most of these bottles and boxes are tiny works of art. I love the simultaneous simplicity and complexity of the labels and taglines such as, "Miller's Oil formerly known as Snake Oil but does not contain snake oil," and "The Doctor in Candy Form." 

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Borroum's Drug Store
604 E Waldron Street,
Corinth, MS 38834
Open Mon-Sat, 9-5

Rowan Oak

When my dad told me that he was planning on us driving from Clarksdale to Tupelo, Mississippi, I immediately started looking up stops along the way. It's only a two-hour drive but I'm always on the lookout for interesting things to see on any roadtrip, no matter how short—it's always more about the journey, right? I didn't find much, but I'm always up for a historic home so we put Rowan Oak, located in Oxford, Mississippi, on the list.

Known as "The Bailey Place" when it was purchased by William Faulkner in 1930, Rowan Oak is a Greek revival house on 29 acres of cedar and hardwood trees. The home was built in the 1840s by Colonel Robert Sheegog, an Irish immigrant and Tennessee farmer. Faulkner renamed the house after the rowan tree, a symbol of peace and security. 

Faulkner, along with his wife and three children, lived at Rowan Oak until his death in 1962. While living at the house, Faulkner won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949 and the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award in 1954. Anecdotes included in the house brochure make Faulkner sound like quite the pill. He fought with his daughter over her possession of a radio and he hated air conditioning so much he refused to have it in the house—the window unit in his wife's bedroom was installed the day after his funeral.

Faulkner's daughter Jill sold the house in 1972 to the University of Mississippi and you can take a self-guided tour for $5 (students get in free). The house is beautiful but feels lived-in in a way that Gilded-age "houses" like The Breakers in Newport never could. I love touring opulent mansions but I also love seeing places like Rowan Oak—it's historic and grand but it still feels like home for real people.

In fact, my favorite parts of the home were the ones that felt the most ordinary. In Faulkner's writing room, he actually wrote the plot outline for A Fable on the wall in graphite and red grease pencil. In a corner of the kitchen sits a rotary telephone, surrounded by handwritten phone numbers for family, friends and local businesses, including the hospital.

Of course I would move into the house in a heartbeat, but the grounds of Rowan Oak are the real attraction. There are several outbuildings on the property known as Bailey's Woods, including a detached kitchen, barn, servants' quarters, stable and multiple gardens. But it's the walkway leading up to the house that really stole my heart—lined with huge eastern red cedar trees, they were planted after a yellow fever epidemic swept through the South because it was believed that cedars had air cleansing properties.

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Rowan Oak
916 Old Taylor Road
Oxford, MS 38655
Summer Hours: June 1 through August 1, Mon through Sat, 10am-6pm, and Sun 1pm-6pm

Little Zion Missionary Baptist Church Cemetery

After visiting the Crossroads where Robert Johnson allegedly sold his soul to the devil in Clarksdale, Mississippi, we drove about an hour south to pay our respects to Johnson himself. Like a lot of things about Johnson's life, the location of his remains is still up for debate—in fact, three different spots in the same Mississippi county claim to be the blues legend's final resting place.

Even the cause of Johnson's death at the age of 27 is still somewhat of a mystery. The most popular theory says that Johnson, having flirted with a married woman, drank from a whiskey bottle poisoned by her jealous husband. His condition worsened and after three days of convulsions and severe pain, he died on August 16, 1938 in Greenwood, Mississippi. Because death from poison (such as strychnine, which has been suspected in this case) would have occurred within hours, not days, it has also been suggested that Johnson may have died of syphilis.

Three different churches around Greenwood have markers dedicated to Johnson, but we only had enough time to check out one of them. Based on its proximity to the plantation where Johnson died, the Little Zion Missionary Baptist Church cemetery is the most likely of the three locations to actually contain Johnson's remains. 

A Mississippi Blues Trail marker at the church reads: “ROBERT JOHNSON – A seminal figure in the history of the Delta blues, Robert Johnson (1911-1938) synthesized the music of Delta blues pioneers such as Son House with outside traditions. He in turn influenced such artists as Muddy Waters and Elmore James. Johnson’s compositions, notable for their poetic qualities, include the standards ‘Sweet Home Chicago’ and ‘Dust My Broom.’ Johnson’s mysterious life and early death continue to fascinate blues fans. He is thought to be buried in this graveyard.”

The church itself wasn't open when we visited, but it's exactly what I imagined a roadside baptist church in the middle of Mississippi would look like. The churchyard contains a handful of graves—including, coincidentally or not, several other Johnsons—and it was flooded and very muddy. If you're facing the church, Robert Johnson's grave is located in the back corner of the churchyard to the left, but it's hard to miss. His grave was covered in mementos—liquor bottles, beer cans, guitar picks, coins, a string of beads and other fan offerings like Divine's headstone in Maryland—and a donation box sits next to the headstone.

Part of the inscription on the front of the headstone is Johnson's own words, handwritten shortly before his death, "Jesus of Nazareth, King of Jerusalem / I know that my Redeemer liveth and that / He will call me from the Grave." The back of the headstone is inscribed with lyrics from Johnson's song "Four Until Late," “When I leave this town / I’m 'on bid you fare ... farewell / And when I return again / You’ll have a great long story to tell.”

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Little Zion Missionary Baptist Church
63530 Money Road,
Leflore County, Mississippi.

Clarksdale

Clarksdale is located in the Mississippi Delta, an hour and forty minutes south of Memphis, Tennessee. It's historically significant in the development of blues music, and Highway 61, or the "Blues Highway" runs through Clarksdale. It's at the crossroads of Highways 61 and 49 in Clarksdale that Robert Johnson allegedly sold his soul to the devil for the ability to play guitar.

Clarksdale is also home to the Delta Blues Museum (housed in the old Illinois Central Railroad passenger depot) as well as several blues and juke joint festivals. Three Mississippi Blues Trail markers are located in Clarksdale, and the museum now houses the remains of the Stovall Farms cabin where Muddy Waters lived during his days as a sharecropper.

We were a little too early in the day to see the devil, but we did have some delicious bar-b-q at Abe's, serving genuine pit bar-b-q in Clarksdale since 1924. I decided in Memphis that I was done with trying to like any meat-on-bone, so I opted for the pulled pork sandwich. According to Abe's, "it’s very possible that Robert Johnson, while sitting on a Coca-Cola case under one of the sycamore trees that was prominent at that corner back then, eating an Abe’s Bar-B-Q made that legendary deal."

The crossroads is, in fact, right next to Abe's, marked by a sign in the middle of a tiny triangle of grass. As is common with legends (and Robert Johnson in particular), there are multiple locations that claim to be the site of Johnson's notorious deal, but only the Clarksdale location has an indisputably rich blues history and a sign. My dad is already a mean guitar player, so he joked that if we saw the devil he was going to convince him to sell his soul to him.

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Delta Blues Museum
1 Blues Alley
Clarksdale, MS 38614

Abe's Bar-B-Q
616 N State Street
Clarksdale, MS 38614

Ground Zero Blues Club
387 Delta Avenue
Clarksdale, MS 38614

Corinth National Cemetery

Established in 1866, Corinth National Cemetery is located in the northeast corner of Mississippi. The two-acre cemetery sits on the site of one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War. Two battles —in the spring and fall of 1862—occurred in Corinth, which was located at the junction of two major rail lines.

In May, Confederate troops—suffering from poor water supplies, typhoid and dysentery—secretly retreated and Union troops took over the abandoned town. In October, 20,000 Confederate troops returned to Corinth. The ensuing battle resulted in 2,360 Union and 4,800 Confederate casualties. In the end the Union remained in control of the town, and used it as a base for additional conflicts in Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee. 

A national cemetery was established to bury the Union dead and by 1870, the cemetery contained 5,688 interments, including almost 4,000 unknown soldiers. Three Confederate soldiers—one unknown and two known—are also buried in the cemetery. Some of the unknown dead's graves are marked with numbers, while others have stones that simply say "Unknown U.S. Soldier."

In order to be eligible for burial in a national cemetery, the deceased must have been a member of the armed forces and have met a minimum active duty service requirement. A veteran's spouse and children may be eligible, even if they predecease the veteran. In some cases, the spouse's name is placed on the back of the headstone.

National cemeteries lack the variety and interesting design details that I usually seek out in cemeteries, but they're sobering places to visit. It's hard to look at row after row of identical white stones—most representing a life taken in battle—and not wonder if the price we pay for near-constant war is really worth it. 

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Corinth National Cemetery
1551 Horton Street
Corinth, MS 38834
Open daily, 8am-sunset

State Line Big John

I just got back from a five day trip down South with my dad—we met in Memphis and took a little road trip through Tennessee, Mississippi and dipped into Alabama for an afternoon. Of course I made a pre-trip map, and we managed to hit all of my stops, and more. When we pulled up to the State Line Big John—so named because he lives just over the Tennessee-Mississippi border—my dad exclaimed "It's not an Allie road trip without a big statue!" (very true).

Built for the Big John grocery store chain based out of Illinois, Big John statues are about 30 feet tall. The stores and statues were named after the 1961 Jimmy Dean song, Big Bad John and the statues originally wore checkered shirts, aprons and blue jeans and carried four grocery bags stuffed full of food.

Big Johns are understandably often confused with Muffler Men, although they're much more rare—of the 30 or so originally produced, only eight are publicly accessible now, according to Roadside America. The State Line Big John stands outside of a Boom City fireworks store and he looks as if he has recently received quite the makeover. His shirt now features the Boom City logo and he is sporting sunglasses, a fedora and even a gold tooth. 

I'm sad that this Big John no longer holds his grocery bags (or even a big firework)—I thought the pole was structural at first, but now I think it's probably for holding a sign. Of course I would have loved to see this guy in his original state, but an extreme makeover (however dubious) is much preferred to losing this classic piece of Americana altogether.

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State Line Big John
9199 US-61
Walls, Mississippi 38680