Studies in the South and West, with Comments on Canada

by Charles Dudley Warner

The traveller, however, does not need figures to convince him of the business activity of the town; the piles of cotton beyond the capacity of storage, the street traffic, the extension of streets and residences far beyond the city limits, all speak of growth. There is in process of construction a union station to accommodate the six railways now meeting there and others projected. On the west of the river it has lines to Kansas City and Little Rock and to St. Louis; on the east, to Louisville and to the Atlantic seaboard direct, and two to New Orleans. With the building of the bridge, which is expected to be constructed in a couple of years, Memphis will be admirably supplied with transportation facilities.

As to its external appearance, it must be said that the city has grown so fast that city improvements do not keep pace with its assessable value. The inability of the city to go into debt is a wholesome provision, but under this limitation the city offices are shabby, the city police quarters and court would disgrace an indigent country village, and most of the streets are in bad condition for want of pavement. There are fine streets, many attractive new residences, and some fine old places, with great trees, and the gravelled pikes running into the country are in fine condition, and are favorite drives. There is a beautiful country round about, with some hills and pleasant woods. Looked at from an elevation, the town is seen to cover a large territory, and presents in the early green of spring a charming appearance. Some five miles out is the Montgomery race-track, park, and club-house—a handsome establishment, prettily laid out and planted, already attractive, and sure to be notable when the trees are grown.

The city has a public-school system, a Board of Education elected by popular vote, and divides its fund fairly between schools for white and colored children. But it needs good school-houses as much as it needs good pavements. In 1887 the tax of one and a half mills produced $54,000 for carrying on the schools, and $19,000 for the building fund. It was not enough—at least $75,000 were needed. The schools were in debt. There is a plan adopted for a fine High-school building, but the city needs altogether more money and more energy for the public schools. According to some reports the public schools have suffered from politics, and are not as good as they were years ago, but they are undoubtedly gaining in public favor, notwithstanding some remaining Bourbon prejudice against them. The citizens are making money fast enough to begin to be liberal in matters educational, which are only second to sanitary measures in the well-being of the city. The new free Public Library, which will be built and opened in a couple of years, will do much for the city in this direction. It is the noble gift of the late F. H. Cossitt, of New York, formerly a citizen of Memphis, who left $75,000 for that purpose.

Perhaps the public schools of Memphis would be better (though not so without liberal endowment) if the city had not two exceptionally good private schools for young ladies. These are the Clara Conway Institute and the Higby School for Young Ladies, taking their names from their principals and founders. Each of these schools has about 350 pupils, from the age of six to the mature age of graduation, boys being admitted until they are twelve years old. Each has pleasant grounds and fine buildings, large, airy, well planned, with ample room for all the departments—literature, science, art, music—of the most advanced education. One finds in them the best methods of the best schools, and a most admirable spirit. It is not too much to say that these schools give distinction to Memphis, and that the discipline and intellectual training the young ladies receive there will have a marked effect upon the social life of the city. If one who spent some delightful hours in the company of these graceful and enthusiastic scholars, and who would like heartily to acknowledge their cordiality, and his appreciation of their admirable progress in general study, might make a suggestion, it would be that what the frank, impulsive Southern girl, with her inborn talent for being agreeable and her vivid apprehension of life, needs least of all is the cultivation of the emotional, the rhetorical, the sentimental side. However cleverly they are done, the recitation of poems of sentiment, of passion, of lovemaking and marriage, above all, of those doubtful dialect verses in which a touch of pseudo-feeling is supposed to excuse the slang of the street and the vulgarity of the farm, is not an exercise elevating to the taste. I happen to speak of it here, but I confess that it is only a text from which a little sermon might be preached about “recitations” and declamations generally, in these days of overdone dialect and innuendoes about the hypocrisy of old-fashioned morality.

The city has a prosperous college of the Christian Brothers, another excellent school for girls in the St. Agnes Academy, and a colored industrial school, the Lemoyne, where the girls are taught cooking and the art of house-keeping, and the boys learn carpentering. This does not belong to the public-school system.

Whatever may be the opinion about the propriety of attaching industrial training to public schools generally, there is no doubt that this sort of training is indispensable to the colored people of the South, whose children do not at present receive the needed domestic training at borne, and whose education must contribute to their ability to earn a living. Those educated in the schools, high and low, cannot all be teachers or preachers, and they are not in the way of either social elevation or thrifty lives if they have neither a trade nor the taste to make neat and agreeable homes. The colored race cannot have it too often impressed upon them that their way to all the rights and privileges under a free government lies in industry, thrift, and morality. Whatever reason they have to complain of remaining discrimination and prejudice, there is only one way to overcome both, and that is by the acquisition of property and intelligence. In the history of the world a people were never elevated otherwise. No amount of legislation can do it. In Memphis—in Southern cities generally—the public schools are impartially administered as to the use of money for both races. In the country districts they are as generally inadequate, both in quality and in the length of the school year. In the country, where farming and domestic service must be the occupations of the mass of the people, industrial schools are certainly not called for; but in the cities they are a necessity of the present development.

Ever since Memphis took itself in hand with a new kind of municipal government, and made itself a healthful city, good-fortune of one kind and another seems to have attended it. Abundant water it could get from the river for sewerage purposes, but for other uses either extensive filters were needed or cisterns were resorted to. The city was supplied with water, which the stranger would hesitate to drink or bathe in, from Wolf River, a small stream emptying into the Mississippi above the city. But within the year a most important discovery has been made for the health and prosperity of the town. This was the striking, in the depression of the Gayoso Bayou, at a depth of 450 feet, perfectly pure water, at a temperature of about 62°, in abundance, with a head sufficient to bring it in fountains some feet about the level of the ground. Ten wells had been sunk, and the water flowing was estimated at ten millions of gallons daily, or half enough to supply the city. It was expected that with more wells the supply would be sufficient for all purposes, and then Memphis will have drinking water not excelled in purity by that of any city in the land. It is not to be wondered at that this incalculable good-fortune should add buoyancy to the business, and even to the advance in the price, of real estate. The city has widely outgrown its corporate limits, there is activity in building and improvements in all the pleasant suburbs, and with the new pavements which are in progress, the city will be as attractive as it is prosperous.

Climate is much a matter of taste. The whole area of the alluvial land of the Mississippi has the three requisites for malaria—heat, moisture, and vegetable decomposition. The tendency to this is overcome, in a measure, as the land is thoroughly drained and cultivated. Memphis has a mild winter, long summer, and a considerable portion of the year when the temperature is just about right for enjoyment. In the table of temperature for 1887 I find that the mean was 61.9°, the mean of the highest by months was 84.9°, and the mean lowest was 37.4°. The coldest month was January, when the range of the thermometer was from 72.2° to 4.3°, and the hottest was July, when the range was from 99° to 67.30. There is a preponderance of fair, sunny weather. The record for 1887 was: 157 days of clear, 132 fair, 65 cloudy, 91 days of frost. From this it appears that Memphis has a pretty agreeable climate for those who do not insist upon a good deal of “bracing,” and it has a most genial and hospitable society.

Early on the morning of the 12th of April we crossed the river to the lower landing of the Memphis and Little Rock Railway, the upper landing being inaccessible on account of the high water. It was a delicious spring morning, the foliage, half unfolded, was in its first flush of green, and as we steamed down the stream the town, on bluffs forty feet high, was seen to have a noble situation. All the opposite country for forty miles from the river was afloat, and presented the appearance of a vast swamp, not altogether unpleasing in its fresh dress of green. For forty miles, to Madison, the road ran upon an embankment just above the flood; at intervals were poor shanties and little cultivated patches, but shanties, corn patches, and trees all stood in the water. The inhabitants, the majority colored, seemed of the sort to be content with half-amphibious lives. Before we reached Madison and crossed St. Francis River we ran through a streak of gravel. Forest City, at the crossing of the Iron Mountain Railway, turned out to be not exactly a city, in the Eastern meaning of the word, but a considerable collection of houses, with a large hotel. It seemed, so far in the wilderness, an irresponsible sort of place, and the crowd at the station were in a festive, hilarious mood. This was heightened by the playing of a travelling band which we carried with us in the second-class car, and which good-naturedly unlimbered at the stations. It consisted of a colored bass-viol, violin, and guitar, and a white cornet. On the way the negro population were in the majority, all the residences were shabby shanties, and the moving public on the trains and about the stations had not profited by the example of the commercial travellers, who are the only smartly dressed people one sees in these regions. A young girl who got into the car here told me that she came from Marianna, a town to the south, on the Languille River, and she seemed to regard it as a central place. At Brinkley we crossed the St. Louis, Arkansas, and Texas road, ran through more swamps to the Cache River, after which there was prairie and bottom-land, and at De Valle’s Bluff we came to the White River. There is no doubt that this country is well watered. After White River fine reaches of prairie-land were encountered—in fact, a good deal of prairie and oak timber. Much of this prairie had once been cultivated to cotton, but was now turned to grazing, and dotted with cattle. A place named Prairie Centre had been abandoned; indeed, we passed a good many abandoned houses before we reached Carlisle and the Galloway. Lonoke is one of the villages of rather mean appearance, but important enough to be talked about and visited by the five aspirants for the gubernatorial nomination, who were travelling about together, each one trying to convince the people that the other four were unworthy the office. This is lowland Arkansas, supporting a few rude villages, inhabited by negroes and unambitious whites, and not a fairly representative portion of a great State.

At Argenta, a sort of railway and factory suburb of the city, we crossed the muddy, strong-flowing Arkansas River on a fine bridge, elevated so as to strike high up on the bluff on which Little Rock is built. The rock of the bluff, which the railway pierces, is a very shaly slate. The town lying along the bluff has a very picturesque appearance, in spite of its newness and the poor color of its brick. The situation is a noble one, commanding a fine prospect of river and plain, and mountains to the west rising from the bluff on a series of gentle hills, with conspicuous heights farther out for public institutions and country houses. The eity, which has nearly thirty thousand inhabitants, can boast a number of handsome business streets with good shops and an air of prosperous trade, with well-shaded residence streets of comfortable houses; but all the thoroughfares are bad for want of paving, Little Rock being forbidden by the organic law ( as Memphis is ) to run in debt for city improvements. A city which has doubled its population within eight years, and been restrained from using its credit, must expect to suffer from bad streets, but its caution about debt is reassuring to intending settlers. The needed street improvements, it is understood, however, will soon be under way, and the citizens have the satisfaction of knowing that when they are made, Little Rock will be a beautiful city.