Researching the “Looking Back” feature each week for Saturday’s paper is an enjoyable duty for me. As a newcomer to Columbia, it’s helpful to learn about the social and business history that helped shape the region.
It’s fun to sift through bound volumes of old newspapers, although that tends to get me distracted because there’s always another tidbit to savor. Now we can access the C-P’s archives via Newspapers.com. It’s amazing that they’ve taken pages scanned from microfilm and somehow made it searchable. You can find anyone or anything that appeared in print here since 1952.
That’s pretty cool, and it speeds up the process, although you never learn as much as you do flipping through a printed copy (remember that the next time your subscription comes due).
You can see major events develop over time as you look over the arc of history, and I noticed one in the last few weeks that gave me pause.
In 1978, the state published its intent to four-lane U.S. 98 in Marion County. It was such a big deal that the story ran above the flag (the term for a newspaper’s logo bearing its name) at the very top of the front page.
Seeing that come to fruition was a long process; another story in 1993 announced the final stretch would be completed with funds generated by the 1987 gas tax increase (which remains the last time that tax went up).
Has that highway expansion been a good or bad thing for Marion County? Undoubtedly it’s made it easier for goods to flow through the area; it’s hard to imagine any modern manufacturer making things in an area served by narrow, two-lane roads. So much of commerce today is completed via tractor trailers and those big rigs need room. Simply put, any modern town must have a major highway, just like rivers two centuries ago around the time Columbia was settled on the Pearl and one century back when the railroads steamed through Mississippi.
But something of a town’s unique charm is lost when it moves forward for that never-ending push toward more and more filthy lucre.
In Columbia’s case, a longtime resident was telling me recently how the day after Thanksgiving was once the busiest day of the year downtown; now it’s one of the quietest as people are either burning their fossil fuels on the four-lane to Hattiesburg or, moreso every year, clicking through websites in a lonely manner to see how they can save 14 cents at the expense of the friends and neighbors and ultimately themselves when there’s nowhere left to shop or work in their own town.
Plus there’s a leadership drain in rural cities throughout Mississippi caused by people working in suburban areas in adjoining counties and driving into work.
Perhaps my view on all this is too melancholy. You certainly can’t go back to two-lane highways any more than you could passenger riverboats.
But maybe we can at least look back on history and learn from it to make choices about the direction of our community that can balance the undisputed need for growth with the equally pressing reality that some of the old ways should be retained.
Charlie Smith is editor and publisher of The Columbian-Progress. Reach him at csmith@columbianprogress.com.
