Ever since an iron fence went up around it five years ago, Florewood Park has looked more like a run-down private estate than a county-run park.
One of the tall iron gates opens on most days to allow trucks from the Leflore County Unit System to pass through to buildings where some of their equipment is stored.
Beyond that daily activity — with the exception of two occasions in the last decade when part of the park has been used as a movie set — the 100-acre park, open green fields surrounded by hardwood forest, stands largely empty and unused.
Last week, however, a drive into the park through one of those open gates revealed a new wooden fishing pier and a slowly filling lake on the property’s front acreage, closest to the main road.
The lake appeared about three-quarters filled on Friday, sparkling and clean beneath rising thunderheads in the summer sky.
Leflore County Board of Supervisors President Anjuan Brown spearheaded the effort to have the area for the lake dredged a little over a year ago. Now, Brown said, water has been flowing into it for about a month.
“The state Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks built the pier and are now looking into stocking it for us,” Brown said. “We’re grateful for that.”
Brown said he’s hopeful that by next summer, fishing programs the county has been discussing will be available, opening the park to the public again — at least on days when there are designated activities.
“We have a few things in mind, nothing concrete,” he said.
Brown would like to see fishing outings for residents of nursing homes, fishing rodeos for kids, church activities, and occasions when the facility could be open to allow people to come out and drop a line.
“It won’t be an everyday thing. We want to be able to keep it going, and we’ll have to have something structured in place,” he said.
It’s a far cry from the property’s heyday when it was a state park opened in 1976, designed to recreate an 1850s Civil War-era cotton plantation complete with a “big house” and a range of other buildings built to the specifications of the era.
Greenwood architect Charles Bowman designed the buildings, most of them still standing 42 years after Florewood Plantation was first erected.
At Christmas during the park’s heyday, Florewood volunteers and staff crafted 50-foot-long cedar garlands and decorated the place, lighting the windows of the buildings with candles. Greenwood families regularly attended the Christmas parade in the afternoon and then drove over to Florewood for the candle-lighting at sunset.
Wedding announcements in the Commonwealth at that time guided potential guests to receptions at Florewood, to be held on the grounds following an in-town ceremony. The park hosted fall festivals, Civil War re-enactments, antique car shows, charitable outdoor events, class reunions and tours by students.
But by 2004, when the state of Mississippi ordered Florewood closed, along with three of its other state parks, Florewood was already in decline and in need of repairs. It spent the state’s money but didn’t make any in return.
Now, 14 years later, it is largely abandoned.
The plantation buildings, once outfitted with antique furnishings and maintained to look functional, now stand empty in various degrees of disrepair – most with holes in their roofs, some with rotting porches, a few blasted with graffiti.
Like the antebellum period it depicted, the living history theme park has gone with the wind. And over the last 13 years since it closed, attempts to transform it into something new have barely stirred up more than a few dust devils of disagreement.
The future of Florewood, 100 acres of land initially purchased by the state from private landowners and then leased to Leflore County for 25 years at a one-time rental rate of $10, remains in question in 2018. Filling up the lake is the first indicator in several years that there’s life left in the place beyond its intrinsically rich natural resources of forest, swamp and riverbank.
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The county’s lease, signed in 2007, requires that Florewood be used “for outdoor recreation and other related purposes” but doesn’t specify what those other purposes are.
Now, a lake is in place to fulfill the outdoor recreation requirement, once fishermen are allowed in. A contract with an entertainment vendor is also in place, opening Florewood to be used as the site of an as-yet-unnamed music festival this Labor Day weekend.
Many ideas have been tossed around since the state ordered Florewood closed in 2004, many of them designed to bridge a historical gap the antebellum plantation concept didn’t quite fill.
In 2005, the same year Florewood was shuttered, Main Street Greenwood and other cultural organizations brought in a consultant from Texas, Grady Hillman, to assist in creating a cultural plan for the city. Among the ideas shared in that meeting of the minds was a vision of Greenwood as a major destination for heritage tourism – not so different from the living history concept but tuned to different aspects of history beyond the antebellum era.
Locals at that time told Hillman they wanted to see an emphasis on the area’s significant civil rights history.
Hillman’s finished plan, which he said would be up to “the people” to be fulfilled, included suggestions that Florewood be used as a black history museum with an emphasis on the blues, gospel music and other black cultural contributions.
Hillman also suggested the place might remain a working plantation with a cotton culture aspect as part of its focus, an idea not altogether well received.
In 2005, the Mississippi Blues Commission considered the idea of turning Florewood into a visitors center for the then-proposed blues trail that now criss-crosses all of the state, especially the Delta.
“The setting is perfect,” said an enthused Fred Carl Jr.
Carl, founder of Viking Range and a native of Greenwood, was the chairman of the newly formed commission.
Carl said he hoped to find funds through state and federal sources to turn Florewood into a cultural interpretation center to educate people and introduce them to Mississippi’s blues heritage before they set out on trails throughout the Delta, honoring blues history.
Florewood, meanwhile, was stripped of many of its manmade assets in 2005 when all of its period furnishings, farm equipment, home appliances and decorative elements were sold in an auction. An original Eli Whitney cotton gin sold for $132,000, and bedroom furniture once owned by Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest sold for $50,000. Altogether, nearly half a million dollars was raised. All of it went to the state to fund its parks.
Robert Moore, president of the Leflore County Board of Supervisors at the time and also a commissioner with the Mississippi Blues Commission, said in 2005 that an advisory committee was looking at possible uses for the park and that it could possibly be used as a place for travelers to park their recreational vehicles when visiting the Delta.
He said the Blues Commission idea hadn’t been discussed any further.
Discussions of a possible civil rights museum took hold, and Florewood continued to be considered as a possible site with Moore leading the effort.
But a lawsuit, starting in 2007, made any potential use of the park site a troublesome proposition. The Moor family of Greenwood, who had sold the acreage to the state back in the 1970s to be used specifically as a historical park, sued to get it back, arguing it was no longer being used for the purpose outlined in their contract with the state.
The county supervisors moved forward with plans to lease the property from the state in 2007, but developing it was an unrealistic goal as long as the lawsuit remained active.
Under its lease with the state, the county agreed to keep up basic maintenance on the property with an understanding that if they didn’t fulfill their part of the deal, the state could terminate after receiving 30 days’ notice.
The lawsuit rolled on for three more years, with the county minimally maintaining the park, until the case was finally decided in the Mississippi Court of Appeals. The 100-acre property did not revert to its original owners but remained the state’s, leased to Leflore County for “outdoor recreation and other related purposes.”
In 2011, Moore said he would persist in pursuing the development of Florewood “into a civil rights piece, a blues piece, a Southern heritage piece,” adding that it was critical to the development of tourism in Leflore County.
Also in 2011, the county upgraded electrical service at the park, worked on the grounds, removing several years worth of vines that had overtaken many of the open lawn areas, removed dead trees and shrubs and did what it could to keep the dilapidated buildings from falling down under their own weight.
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Except for a small number of recreational vehicle campers who parked there overnight one night last year and a couple of movie crews briefly inhabiting the ghost town that was once Florewood Plantation, few tourists have set foot on Florewood in the last five years.
A few vandals crept in and left tags inside the abandoned buildings prior to 2013; then an iron fence went up to keep them out.
Meanwhile, the natural beauty of the place has gone relatively undisturbed. Cypress swamps glow green through trees lining pristine fields. A crumbling road circling the abandoned plantation buildings borders dense forest, unsullied banks of the Tallahatchie River and that glowing green swamp.
Near the front entrance, a thick hose hooked up to a fire hydrant pumps water into a glittering lake. A newly constructed pier leads out to the middle of the lake.
Brown said a bream bed is already in place, growing the first fish. They’ll need to get to a good size before other fish are added. In a year, the place should be swimming with finned occupants.
Until then, another kind of recreation is scheduled for Florewood, a multi-day musical event produced by a Birmingham outfit, Just in Time Music, Inc.
In May, Just in Time representative John A. Ray appeared before the supervisors promoting his idea of using Florewood for music festivals. A discussion ensued behind closed doors, and in late May the county signed a contract with Ray for three such events, the first to be held over Labor Day weekend this year.
Ray’s contract calls for a soul, blues or gospel music event that may or may not have outside vendors, for which his company is responsible for security, sanitation, set-up and all aspects of execution.
Brown said he had no additional details about the event. County Attorney Joyce Chiles, who drafted the contract, quipped in a recent county board meeting that Ray got a sweet deal. Chiles did not indicate how much money the county will collect for Just in Time’s use of Florewood.
By the end of August, Florewood will be inhabited for a couple of days, fulfilling in part the county’s need to pay for its use with incoming revenue and fulfilling its contract with the state to use the park “for outdoor recreation and other related purposes.”
Florewood, meanwhile, has been the inspiration and receptacle for a range of civic visions over the years. Whether they remain alive or can be accomplished with limited resources, and whether the community will embrace them, remains to be seen.
•Contact Kathryn Eastburn at 581-7235 or keastburn@gwcomonwealth.com.
