Greenwood attorney Katie Mills has been named the interim executive director of the Museum of the Mississippi Delta.
Mills
Mills started in the position Wednesday, according to a statement provided by the museum. It is presently closed to the public due to the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak in Mississippi.
The museum has been without an executive director since the resignation of Cheryl Thornhill in late February. Thornhill, who had served in that position since 2009, resigned over allegations that she had been careless in her stewardship of the museum’s archaeological collections, especially the L.B. Jones Collection.
At the time of Thornhill’s resignation, Tim Stanciel, the president of the museum’s board, said the museum planned to hire an interim administrator while it looked for a permanent replacement.
The latest statement from the board did not mention the search for a permanent executive director or whether Mills would be a candidate for that job.
Efforts to contact Stanciel and Mills for clarification were not immediately successful.
Mills, who grew up on her family’s farm in Leflore and Sunflower counties, has been in private practice for the past nine years. Previously, she served as staff attorney for former Leflore County Chancery Judge Jon Barnwell and as an attorney for the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians.
She unsuccessfully ran for chancery judge in 2018.
Mills has an undergraduate degree in English from the University of Mississippi and a law degree from Mississippi College School of Law. She and her husband, Jonathan, have two sons, William and Henry. Her stepmother, Susie Tackett, is a member of the museum’s board.
Prior to her resignation, Thornhill acknowledged dumping thousands of artifacts out the back door of the museum in 2018, although she has said she did not think any of them were part of the Jones collection — a massive, nationally regarded stockpile of more than 30,000 artifacts that were accumulated by Jones, an amateur archaeologist from Minter City, now deceased.
The Jones collection has been on loan to the museum for decades.
Thornhill was also criticized for loaning out artifacts from the Jones collection without documentation or without securing the approval of the trustees and the Cobb Institute of Archaeology at Mississippi State University, as stipulated in a trust agreement governing the collection.
An inventory ordered by the trustees of the Jones collection has been going on for
months.
According to the curator conducting the inventory, Anna Reginelli, thousands of the artifacts remain missing.
•Contact Tim Kalich at 581-7243 or tkalich@gwcommonwealth.com.
