[We all need comfort texts in 2026, and for my wife and I one of our most surprising finds has been the delightful home renovation show Home Town. The show is deeply tied to its historic community of Laurel, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Laurel histories, leading up to a special weekend tribute to what makes Home Town so special!]
On two contrasting ways to contextualize the town’s 1882 incorporation (in addition to the role of trains, on which more in tomorrow’s post), and an easily overlooked but vital third layer.
The word “incorporation” has a specific meaning for a town or other civic entity that isn’t identical to what Alan Trachtenberg meant in the title and thesis of his magisterial book The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (1982). But I believe there’s nonetheless a lot of overlap between that book’s main ideas (which I traced at length in that hyperlinked blog post from earlier this year) and a key context for the late 19th century development of towns like Laurel: the spread of corporations, and more broadly of businesses and industries, across much of the nation in the century’s final decades. Of course there had been major industry in particular big cities for decades by this time; and of course there had been smaller businesses to produce things like lumber in most communities (although those “businesses” might have been one guy with an axe). But it’s a very 1882 detail to have a small town form around the lumber industry, and that’s why and how Laurel was incorporated (in both senses) in that year.
At the same time, as David Stanton Key’s 2001 MA Thesis “Laurel, Mississippi: A Historical Perspective” argues convincingly in its Introduction, there’s no way to separate the 1882 incorporation of an industrial town in Mississippi from a distinct broader trend: the growth of the “New South.” I connected the development of a different Southern town, Virginia’s Newport News, to that concept in this 2016 blog post, and would say much the same about those connections for Laurel. More exactly, I would point to the compelling main ideas in another vital work of late 20th century AmericanStudies scholarship, Edward Ayers’ The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction (1992). What Ayers does so masterfully is trace real changes in the region during this period (such as those I highlighted in the first paragraph here) while acknowledging that the concept of the “New South” was also always an imaginary one, an ideal for which influential folks like Henry Grady (who coined the term in his 1886 book of that name) were arguing already existed as a way to try to both convince the nation that it did and also push the South to modernize in various ways (including further incorporation, natch).
As the “Life After Reconstruction” in Ayers’ title implies, however—but as I’ve seen in almost no pieces about the 1882 incorporation of Laurel—this moment meant something very specific, and very very horrific, for the region’s African Americans. By the 1880s, white supremacists were back in power in almost every former Confederate state, and were a long way into the full creation of the system of Jim Crow segregation, racial violence and terrorism, denial of rights, and much more that would dominate places like Mississippi until at least the 1960s. Much of that system is captured in the title of another important AmericanStudies book, one that I mentioned as part of this post on the aftermaths of slavery: Douglas Blackmon’s Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (2008). I haven’t been able to find any mention of the role that chain gangs and other incarcerated laborers would certainly have played in building and maintaining the lumber industry in 1882 Laurel, Mississippi—but they would have, and there’s no way we can think about this place and time without better remembering that painful and central layer.
Next LaurelStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think?
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