At Neshoba Fair, front-porch living blends with politicking, horse racing and muggy Miss. heat

Thousands sweat, and love it, at Mississippi fair

PHILADELPHIA, Miss. — Out on the cabin porches where fairgoers have gathered for decades, it’s old home week.

There’s gossip, how’s-your-mama banter, ice-cold sweet tea and, if you know where to look in this mostly dry county, a little hooch.

As the nation roils in recession, overseas wars and the federal health care debate, in Mississippi it’s just too darned hot to care — at least at the Neshoba County Fair.

“There’s a hard-core cult of true believers who grew up coming to the fair and wouldn’t miss it,” said Dick Molpus, who hasn’t skipped one in his 59 years.

Tens of thousands of people make a sweltering pilgrimage every July or August to the eight-day fair on 60 acres of rolling hills, red clay, oaks and pines in east central Mississippi.

The fair is known as “Mississippi’s Giant House Party” because extended families set up residence in 600 shotgun-style cabins that are among the state’s most prized pieces of real estate. More than one divorce has stalled because of fights about who would get the cabin.

About 50 cabins surround Founders Square, where politicians swoop in for two days of speeches under a tin-roofed, open-air pavilion filled with wooden pews. Other cabins line small, unpaved passageways with names like “Happy Hollow.” Still others surround a dirt track, where jockeys race horses and teenagers prod unpredictable mules.

Jim Perry, a 33-year-old New York investment banker, grew up in Mississippi. As a child, he’d fall asleep during the fair’s all-night singing sessions, where people harmonized with gospel tunes like “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.”

“You have to have an attitude about life where you can be comfortable sitting and talking,” Perry said. “If you can’t take a week out of the year to do that, then your priorities aren’t in the right place.”

His father, Pete Perry, bought a cabin in 1973. It’s now a hub for Republicans to have a cold drink and engage in off-the-record political scheming. Among the guests this week was Republican Gov. Haley Barbour, who swapped Hurricane Katrina stories with friends as a staffer plucked a banjo.

The fair dates back to 1889, with some years off for World War II. It offers the traditional midway rides, fried-food-on-a-stick and exhibitions of livestock, quilts and prize-winning vegetables.

Molpus has spent part of each summer on the sawdust-strewn fairgrounds and his cabin occupies a prime spot on Founders Square, where the family makes lunch for hundreds of visitors each year — ham, sliced tomatoes, cold black-eyed peas, thick slices of caramel cake.

The barefoot country living comes at a price. While residential lots in nearby Philadelphia go for about $20,000, the narrow cabin sites on Founders Square sell for $150,000 to $200,000. People sink another $100,000 or more into tearing down and fixing up the structures, with massive camp-style bedrooms typically filled with enough bunk beds to sleep 10, 20 or more.

In a place where summer air can feel like wet cotton, “it was originally considered kind of low-class to air-condition your cabin,” Molpus said. People started surreptitiously installing window units during the 1970s.

In the past several years, rickety structures have been replaced with two- and three-story buildings that look more like beach condos than state park cabins.

Many are painted in a rainbow of colors — bright turquoise with lime-green window trim, tangerine walls painted with parrots, carnation pink with purple porch railings.

Outside Mississippi, the county is known for something far less pleasant: the 1964 “Mississippi Burning” slayings of three civil rights workers. The fairgrounds are just a few miles from where Ku Klux Klansmen buried the young men in an earthen dam.

In 2005, state prosecutors brought charges against reputed Klansman Edgar Ray Killen and a Neshoba County jury convicted him of manslaughter.

At the fair a few weeks later, Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood, who had helped prosecute the case, boasted: “Aren’t you proud of Neshoba Countians for what they’ve done to right a past wrong? Aren’t you proud to tell the world that you’re from the state of Mississippi, that we will do the right thing in Mississippi?”

In 1980, Ronald Reagan made the Neshoba County Fair one of his first campaign appearances after accepting the Republican presidential nomination at the national convention. During a speech that was moved from the Founders Square pavilion to the racetrack to accommodate the crowd, Reagan roiled critics by invoking “states’ rights.”

In 1988, Democrat Michael Dukakis also spoke, and his signature still decorates a poster in a cabin owned by Democrats Gloria and Ed Williamson.

The Williamsons have had a place at the fair since the 1980s; they tore down the original two-story structure in 2002 and replaced it with a three-story cabin that’s painted canary yellow with red trim.

About 20 years ago, one teenager slept in the family’s cabin for five days. As he left, he shook hands with all the women, told them how much he had enjoyed their food and thanked them for their hospitality.

Gloria Williamson told one of her young relatives he should ask the boy back next year. Turns out, nobody knew the teenager before that week, and nobody had invited him. He just showed up, stayed and blended in with the crowd.

She still laughs at the memory: “He had the nicest manners.”

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On the Net:

Neshoba County Fair: www.neshobacountyfair.org