Pearl is located in the extreme northwest corner of Simpson County on Pearl River. Her boundaries are the river on the west, Rankin County on the north, the Hedgepeth-Hill-Harrisville Road on the east, and the Big Creek on the South.

Pearl and Pearl River are names that have been handed down to the settlers from the days when the first Mississippi families inhabited the Simpson County land.Pearl has her plains and her hills but neither of these geographical features comes all in one piece. Short leaf pines, oaks, and sweetgum are the leading timber trees. However,sawmills and wood pulp dealers have cut deep into the forest, but from March to November her many flowers can be seen from tile roadside The woods are full of most of the State's beautiful flowers such as magnolias, dogwood, redbud, pink honeysuckle, wisteria,woodvine, yellow jasmine, buckeye, red sumac, huckleberry, white hydrangea, tiny pink and white cherokee roses, white and blue violets, blackeyed susans, goldenrod, sweet William,Japanese mulberry, and others too numerous to list. Chenquapen,chestnuts,andhickory nuts that once covered the ground in the fall are no longer to be found. In 1924 blight killed the trees. Pastures and farmlands have crowded out most of the blackberries and huckleberries. The cedars have blighted the apple trees and in 1974 the wormsand flies have blighted the pecan trees with a fungus. Wildlife was once abundant, but much of it began to disappear with the passing of the frontier.

Today there are almost more hunters than deer, turkey, quail, squirrel and rabbit. There are a few hunters for fox, raccoon, duck, mink and o'possum. Beavers are numerous and destructive to trees by the river. The woods still ring with the wide range of the official State mockingbird and the citizens enjoy watching for the first flight of migratory birds heading to and from the tropics.Because of moderate weather Pearl is a pleasant place to live.

In 1824 the Indians, whom the early ancestors of Pearl en-countered along the Pearl River, at that time in Copiah County, were the Choctaws. Supposedly the Choctaw tribesmen migrated to the Mississippi area from the West. Tradition has it that they came on their long journey under the leadership of Choctaw and his brother Chickasaw who founded the two tribes and gave their names to them. Accordingly, to a legend, the tribesmen were guided on their journey by a sacred`pole which was set up at night and which, in the morining, indicated by the direction in which it leaned what course should be followed that day, and they settled where the pole remained upright.

The origin and character of the Choctaw Indians are strange, but the origin and customs of the first settlers are also strange. Family trees are very difficult to establish for the lack of written records -- unkept or burned.

Today Mississippi Indian heritage is almost forgotten. Very little is known about the Choctaws who once hunted and roamed the forest through which today our highways stretch. Occasionally, the discovery of an arrowhead, a scraper, a nut cracker, an anvil, or an ax stirs the curiosity of the modern Mississippian. However, these white people did discover mounds and flints which once lay thick on the ground east of Pearl River. Today only the mound on the T. W. Lewis farm has been preserved, but now and then people without permission dig into Historians say that Indian mounds are burial grounds. The

Choctaws' burial practices are like the ancient Persians who placed the dead person on an elevated platform where it remained from one to six months to decompose or to be eaten by birds of prey. In due time there was an elaborate funeral ceremony. A special tribal undertaker, known as a bone picker, who used his long fingernails to clean the bones of remaining flesh. The picked bones were placed in a hamper in the bone house. The flesh was either burned or buried; then everyone had a great feast presided over by the bone picker who had not washed his hands. Several times a year the bone house was emptied of its contents and the remains of the dead were buried in mounds.

After 1830 it was not extremely difficult for the white man to invade Mississippi because the Indians moved on to other parts. Most of the Choctaw tribesmen were eventually banished to the Indian Territory in Oklahoma in order to make way for the white settlers that year. Perhaps some Choctaws went to the federal reserve located in the central part of the State, mostly in Neshoba County, where, today, there is an Indian Reservation with schools and homes. A great attraction is their annual fair in August.

After the Indians left, Pearl was first a community of white people, but it is not known from whence they came, but the Negro slaves came from Africa.

According to B. King's report to the "Simpson County News" the early settlers from the Carolinas sent back to their relatives glowing descriptions of the new county which was formed out of Copiah County in 1824, and homesteads could be had for the asking. From 1830 to 1840 Pearl's population greatly increased. Cotton sold for eighteen cents a pound. In 1862 the Homestead Act enabled settlers to secure a title to 160 acres of land merely by occupying and cultivating the land for five years and paying a ten dollar registration fee. Too, land grants were easily acquired directly from the government or through land speculators. The government's price was one dollar and twenty-five cents an acre. The sixteenth Section land was leased for ninety-nine years at a small fee.

Although the cotton gin was invented in 1793 there was not one in Pearl until 1886 when Mr. Carson Hilton moved from Old Westville and installed his gin on his Sixteenth Section farm. Until then children had to separate the seed from the lint by hand and fill their shoes with seed before going to bed.

Near the east bank of Pearl River families came and built their houses, soon other pioneer families came, and a village grew up. The dates of the settlers seem to be determined by the style of houses, namely: Catwalk log houses and the one room log hut or huts for slaves; dogtrot houses, sawmill lumber; ranch style houses -- factory made bricks or siding; two, two-storied houses and one split-level house and mobile homes. Near the sunny side of the smokehouse was an ash barrel where once a year the housewife would pour water on the ashes to drip lye to which she added hog fat and boiled until it thickened. When it cooled she cut it into long bars of lye soap. After soap making there was always more lye dripped to make a washpot full of lye corn.

At the Lewises there is still the smokehouse, but no meat and the dirt floor is covered by a rug. Perhaps the art of lye soap making is extinct for long past Octagon soap and its soap wrappers were popular. Soon they were replaced by various detergents.

The Lewis' dining table seated twenty five, and there was seldom a vacant seat. For many years there were two long benches and two cowhide bottom chairs around the table. In the center of the table sat a salt celler, a sugar bowl, and a spoon holder. In the corner of the dining room was a paper fly fan or a green branch of a tree which a slave moved over the table as the people ate. The slaves ate in the kitchen and sat on stools. The Liege Sandifer catwalk house has been restored by his son, Wilburn Sandifer. He too, remodeled the house for comfort. The logs round on the outside but flat on the other sides -- were used across the long front of a new ranch style house.

After slaves were freed each family and his neighbors worked together clearing new grounds for farms or for pastures. After the owner cut his trees and bushes, he invited the neighbors to a logrolling, corn husking, and a square dance. The men rolled the logs and shucked the corn while the wives prepared dinner and supper which they served on a long table on the front porch. The small children played while the larger children took turns fanning the flies from the food on the table. Cakes and sweet potatoes had been baked and hams had been boiled the day before. So frying the chicken, making the pies, cornbread, biscuits and salad, and opening the pickled cucumbers and peaches were joyous tasks as the women enjoyed discussing the news and the neighborhood activities and making ready for the square dance that lasted late into the night.

Before 1900 Pearl petitioned for a post office that was located in the Barron Store which burned in 1930. Then Pearl community has had different rural mail routes that at first the carrier put mail in boxes on the road but today the mail is delivered on all roads at each home. At first the routes were Star and Harrisville -- now they are Florence and Harrisville.

The Bill Courtney store door was open but the shopper had to ring the bell upon entering the store.

Since the early sixties Pearl has had only one store which is owned and operated by "Bud" Lewis and wife. A gas station and a washeteria are attached to the building.

Walter Dell Davis operates a sawmill on the John Tucker place.

Until the early sixties there was one negro church and two white churches and those two denominations represented the pearl community, but by 1974 New Zion Baptist Church, the only negro church, and the Antioch Baptist Church are the only buildings, but there are many members of various

The members of the Poplar Springs Southern Methodist Church and the Rocky Creek Southern Missionary Baptist Church were closely associated with each other for many years

Soon after Corson Wilbon moved to Pearl he gave New Zion Church and School to the negroes. They were located near the negro cemetery As the years have passed and the Hiltons and Barrons are no longer represented in the Pearl community the negroes have destroyed their old church and school buildings and they have moved them to a site closer to the negro homes. Now they have a modern white church, but they have no school building because in 1972 both white and black children go to Harrisville or New Hymn. They are transferred by school busses driven by trained licensed drivers -- men, school boys or women. White public school systems were established in the period following the war. Because of the lack of tax funds the southern economy was unable to support adequate school facilities for either white or black. But in 1870 the law required children from ages five to twenty-one to attend school. The school session was only four months a year when children were not needed for farm work. Liquor license fees were used to support schools and the county supervisors were required to levy taxes on county residents for the school operation of the State school.

By 1886 school standards were changing. The white school at Pearl was moved from the Rocky Creek Baptist Church to its first school ground as such. The site was then where the Joe Sharpe home is today. Before stock law and during the days when hogs roamed the community their favorite sleeping place was under the school house. Soon the flies got so very bad that the school building was moved to the present site of the Old Pearl Club House. Both the building and the playground were surrounded by a net wire fence to keep out the hogs that bothered the children and their dinner buckets. Now lunch boxes -- as they ate during noontime. Some few years later that fence was taken down and the music house torn down because the music room was in the new school building. This new school building was a two storied building and the neighborhood schools Gates, Countyline, and Palestine consolidated with Pearl. The students were transferred by "tallyhoes" drawn by mules. In 1918 this was the largest school in the county, but in 1953 Pearl and Harrisville consolidated at Harrisville.

In 1954 the County Trustees gave the Pearl School building to the Pearl Community Club. Jack Byrd removed all the building except two downstairs front rooms, a hall, and the front porch and steps.

Today the Senior Citizens are beautifying the building by painting it, adding screen window and door, a kitchen sink, water, lights, an electric cook stove, an electric heater, four tables, thirty-nine chairs, a piano, and four voting booths. This building is used for Beat 5, Third Precinct voting place. Although the first white settlers of Pearl were farmers who grew bountiful crops on the fertile soil; they farmed to make a living, but by 1974 the farmers farm to earn a living.

In 1892 a young French Canadian moved South to engage in the keel-boat business from the Gulf by way of Pearl River to establish a Trading Post called the Le Fleurs Bluff near what is now Jackson's downtown area. The Trading Post flourished between the Choctaws and Chickasaw Indians. Walden B. Lewis shipped his wool, peas, and goose feathers to St. Louis by way of Pearl and the Mississippi Rivers. It is not known with whom he traded. He opened a ferry on Pearl River and had a livery-stable to taxi travelers who crossed his ferry. The Lewis family grew cotton, corn, rice, sugar cane, and raised sheep, hogs, cattle, chickens, geese, turkeys, guineas, peacocks, and ducks.

After the War of 1812, with cotton booming, there was a great demand for cheap labor - the negro slaves or poor white people. Even though slave trade had ended in 1808, perhaps some of the slaves were smuggled into Pearl from the Spanish Territory or from the Upper South. By 1875 white and black people set about the task of getting along together. Suddenly freedom of the slaves created many social and economic problems in Pearl as was true throughout the South.

Because of their years of service, many of the Negroes who had been slaves were ill-prepared to assume the obligations of freemen. Many felt that until the Negro was able to assume the responsibilities accompanying, freedom, segregation was necessary. If the Negro paid a two dollar pole tax which was for school-owned land, and registered he could vote at the county site. There were some few Negroes who complied with the law because they wanted to be good citizens. Sol Ward from Almadale -- Simpson County -- became a Justice of the Peace and once held a Court in Pearl.

Today, there are seventeen black families who own property on the Community roadside. They live close together. Some have leased the Sixteenth Section Land once leased by the Hiltons. Some bought the John Barron land from the Barron descendants. "Aunt Annie Byrd" a midwife who helped Dr. Hough Barron and Dr. J. B. Ainsworth deliver the Walt Lewis' children, did the Lewis wash and helped pick the geese and shear the sheep, purchased 180 acres of land from the Federal Land Bank at $1.50 per acre. She bought the land with her money and the money her three sons sent her while they were in service. Today they have the land leased to an oil company at twenty five dollars per acre.

"Aunt Annie" at the age of ninety-nine died in 1973 but she had willed her estate to all the children who wanted to live there, but the land was not to be sold. Today there are four children and their families living there. The Byrds are very desirable citizens and neighbors.

After farmers go dinner bells hung high in the yards they rang them for field hands and to toll death, fire, neighbors visited each other and spread the news, until 1953 when Webb D. Shivers bought the Florence Telephone Company and extended it into the Pearl and neighboring communities at the rate of six dollars and twenty-five cents. By 1963 Pearl had dial system. Today the Florence Telephone Company is owned by the Mid-Continent Telephone Company Cooperation, Prentiss, Mississippi.

Most of the Community Citizens -- men, women, and children have left the farms to commute to the industries. However, in Pearl the people of one group have come to understand that the welfare of one group depends on the welfare of the other groups.

 FROM THE SIMPSON COUNTY SESQUICENTENNIAL HISTORICAL BOOKLET 1974