The trip took over a week. They all ate some days. Some days just the mules and the dog; and one day, just the mules.
Did you see a house float past?
So allow us to introduce the subject of this sketch, Mr. Lacy Simpson Stoner, and inform you Holly Bluff, Mississippi, was his destination.
Arrived, he had hardly become oriented when the rising Mississippi started his house toward New Orleans and the Gulf. Fortunately it lodged in some nearby trees, and as the river receded, he, aided by block and tackle, floated and pulled it back to its original or approximately original position, where it was made more secure.
In speaking of these floods, Mr. Stoner said, "It was nothing in those days to have some man from up the River come along and inquire, 'Did you see a three room, part-yaller house goin' by here in the last day or two?'"
Crops were good, with fair prices. He plowed back the profits into more and more land and better and better mechanical equipment.
And he took time to come back to Indiana and claim his bride, a
Lafayette girl, the present Mrs. Stoner.
Again the rains came and the water flooded their first floor. They moved what they could to the second floor, where the water soon caught up with them. They tied some of the better and more useful articles up among the rafters, and had just selected the spot to chop out through the roof, to get to the boat which was moored to the house, when the crest of the flood was reached and the water slowly subsided.
Revolution in the Delta
Then followed more and bigger crops, bigger profits, more land, more mechanical equipment and less sharecropper help. Meanwhile, soy beans and other crops gradually supplanted cotton.