Culture
DECEMBER 2021 42 THE
MYSTERY OF DOWNTOWN HATTIESBURG'S
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HISTORY
A Small Step For a Man . . .
THE HISTORY OF JOHN WESLEY FAIRLEY, OWNER OF HATTIESBURG'S MYSTERIOUS FOOTPRINTS By William Browning
F
or as long as anyone can remember, a series of nine footprints encased in brass have been embedded along a busy stretch of sidewalk in downtown Hattiesburg, Mississippi. They have been there so long locals sometimes use them as directional markers. “At the intersection by the footprints,” someone might say, instead of, “At the corner of Main and Front streets.” The local Post Office once received a piece of stamped mail addressed to, “the store across the street from the store with the brass feet,” and the mail carrier knew where to make the delivery—Owl Drug Store. Such is their prominence along the cityscape that in the early 1980s, when downtown sidewalks were being replaced, the crew tasked with removing the old walk-
ways preserved the footprints on direct orders from the mayor, Bobby Chain, who remembered playing on them as a child in the 1930s. Chain was not alone in having sentimental childhood memories of the prints, and when the new sidewalk was revealed, there they were, in the same place they had always been. The Hattiesburg (Miss.) American newspaper praised the preservation effort: “City fathers and work crews easily could have ripped right through the brass feet with their jackhammers, mortar mixers, and pebbly sidewalks,” an editorial from the time read. “But they didn’t. The jackhammer carefully traced the outline of the footprints, workmen carefully lifted them out, and they were neatly replaced in the new
walkway ... As time marches forward, it at least leaves its footprints in downtown Hattiesburg.” It was around that time, during the summer of 1983, that the people of Hattiesburg realized that no one among them actually knew the history of these footprints. No one knew how they had come to be there, how long they had been there, whose feet had made them, or when they had been encased in brass. In a piece headlined, “Footprints mystery not solved yet,” the Hattiesburg (Miss.) American bandied about several possible origin stories, but nothing definitive was ever established. So, the people of Hattiesburg moved on, doing what they had always done: Walking over a series of downtown footprints with an unknown history.
If the Footprint Fits
Who was John Wesley Fairley? John Wesley Fairley was born enslaved by a man named Peter Fairley in Perry County, Mississippi, fifty or so miles north from the Gulf Coast, in 1840. When the Civil War began, “Wes” Fairley, as he was known, went off and joined the Union Army, serving with the 74th Regiment United States Colored Troops. He was stationed on Ship Island, just off the Mississippi coastline, assigned to oversee Confederate prisoners of war. According to legend, Fairley recognized one of the prisoners from before the war, a white man from South Mississippi named Lorenzo Nollie Dantzler. Fairley liked Dantzler and began sneaking him extra rations. For this, Dantzler always credited Fairley with saving his life, and, after acquiring a coastal sawmill in the 1870s, he hired 42
Fairley to float logs down Black Creek. Fairley excelled at the job: Legend has it that he was a powerful man who weighed roughly 225 pounds and— depending on who you ask—stood either seven feet tall or almost seven feet tall. Fairley made his home in Stone County, near the Gulf Coast, and one historian dubbed him “The Paul Bunyan of Stone County.” As the nineteenth century wore on, Fairley, because of his abilities as a “creek runner,” prospered, purchasing property across South Mississippi. He also built an inn near his home on the road between Hattiesburg and Gulfport, where travelers could lodge and rest their horses. In 1900, probably because of old age, Fairley stopped floating logs down Black Creek for Dantzler Lumber Company. He died
N O V 2 1 // C O U N T R Y R O A D S M A G . C O M
Today, nearly forty years later, some questions remain, but the most important has been answered. Thanks to the inquiries of local historians, we now know that the footprints were made by the Mississippi freedman John Wesley Fairley, whose extraordinary life story has, until now, gone largely untold. Hattiesburg-area historian Lisa Foster aims to change that, starting with her current efforts to have a historical marker bearing Fairley’s name placed downtown near the intersection of Front and Main streets. While that will ensure that every passerby knows whose footprints adorn the sidewalk, for Foster, the need for a marker runs much deeper. “Fairley’s history,” she said, “is the history of Hattiesburg.”
in 1918, at the age of seventy-eight. He had married twice—one of his wives was a maid who worked for Dantzler—and had seven children, one of whom he named Dantzler. He is buried in a family cemetery in Stone County. In the late 1930s, the Federal Writers’ Project began collecting narratives from former slaves who were still living. Fairley had been dead for roughly twenty years by then, but a white man named B.H. Breland wrote a brief history of his life to be included in the project because, as he said, “he is entitled to at least this small tribute to his memory.” “(He) enjoyed the respect and goodwill of the white people and the respect and fear of the colored,” the narrative states.
It was a Mississippi historian named Charles Sullivan who stumbled across the fact that Fairley’s footprints are on the Hattiesburg sidewalk. In 1984, Sullivan was conducting an oral history interview with Nollie Hickman, a seventy-two-year-old South Mississippi native who taught at the University of Louisiana-Monroe during the middle of the twentieth century. Hickman, who died in 1987, was the dean of Mississippi timber industry historians and both his father and grandfather, like Wes Fairley, were creek runners for the Dantzler Lumber Company. In fact, Hickman was named after Lorenzo Nollie Dantzler. Knowing this connection, Sullivan asked him about Fairley. After sharing some of Fairley’s story,
