Dixie Roots: The Emma Ferrer Letters, Part 8: A Very Foolish Thing

On December 4, 1898, Emma concedes that she must put her 6-month old son, Powell Ferrer, in the orphanage with her other five children. At the time, she was working at the Grand Avenue Hotel in Meridian, MS as a housekeeper. She says the proprietor did not want her to have the baby there. It’s unclear whether she was getting someone in the hotel to watch Powell while she worked, or whether she was toting him around from room-to-room while she made her rounds. Either way it’s not a prime arrangement.

The trip from Meridian, MS to Summerfield, AL covers about 110 miles, which we assume Emma and Powell made by train. At the time, there were 11 different rail lines running into the city, one of which connected to Selma, Alabama – the East Tennessee, Virginia, and Georgia Rail Road. Selma was about 9 miles South of Summerfield; we presume it’s for this last leg of the trip that she’s asking for “conveyance to the home.”

Hand-drawn map of railroads converging in Meridian, MS. From 1899 Meridian City Directory.
Yellow highlight (added by Dixie Roots) shows the line from Meridian to Selma.

On Railroads and Meridian:
It’s fair to say that the “Golden Age of Meridian” (1890-1930) was due in large part to the city’s high concentration of railroads. The 1899 Meridian City Directory states that, “It would be almost impossible, says an authority of no mean repute, to take a map and draw a line for anew railway running out of Meridian which should not find for itself a belt of country not already fully occupied by existing roads, or roads that contracts are let out, and others that are in contemplation, so numerous are the radiating tracks of steel that enter the magic city.”

Next Week: A boy for Rev. McCoy