True this. I know several people with no ties to Ole Miss who have moved to Oxford. Great public schools and proximity to Memphis/Desoto County are huge advantages.
Starkville Biz Thread
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True this. I know several people with no ties to Ole Miss who have moved to Oxford. Great public schools and proximity to Memphis/Desoto County are huge advantages.
I actually don't have a clue what a "Top Golf Swing Suite" is but on their website they list Stagger as one of their locations, although they list the address as the old Maxwell St location
My impression has always been.... The delta and the prairie are different states within a state. Ive been through and stopped in almost every town east of I55 north of 82. However, Ive never been to Cleveland or Clarksdale. Ive driven through Greenville and Greenwood once. BUt Ive met a lot of people in Memphis that were raised in the Delta. Ive meet non-MSU fans from the delta, Jackson and Natchez areas that have never been to Columbus or Tupelo.
The GTR is its own place. TO far from Desoto County and the coast. To far from Jackson Metro. The GTR and more specific Lowndes County needs to continue to attract business to continue to keep Columbus alive and Starkville flurishing. The GTR needs to turn into Mississippi's, North West Arkansas. People are moving out of Little Rock for the more prosperous NWA. The GTR needs strong political representation in Jackson to keep growing. Hopefully Tupelo will continue to grow with State fans.
Just go look at any vote that would improve Starkville or when someone made a parody account about him and he tried to get SPD involved. Dude is always against anything would benefit all residents and the fact that he always flaunts “praying about it” is gross.
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That would have been in 2007. I was out of town during that show and I still kick myself for not being there.
This, times 1,000. Both Ben Carver and Roy Perkins are terrible for Starkville. We need folks who are willing to move the city forward and not folks who want Starkville to be the same as it was in the 80s.
That's probably a fair statement. When I was in school, all the Delta people knew each other, and all the Starkville, Columbus, Westpoint, Amory, Aberdeen, etc. people knew each other. Tupelo and Pontotoc was also its own area, but they had some cross over with the GTR people and basically none with the Delta.
Still, there were plenty of people at State from the Delta. I'm not sure why they're not getting more of the people abandoning the Delta. It may just be that for people in the Delta, their "city" has always been Jackson or Memphis, so if they are going to relocate, they're going Oxford or Madison.
The central delta is absolutely going to hell from what I keep hearing from folks that grew up there. Right along 82 which is a straight shot to Vegas.
I live in NE Mississippi, in the Tupelo/GTR orbit. We have very little contact with Jackson. We are more closely aligned with Memphis/Birmingham/Huntsville/Nashville than we are Jackson. The only real contact we have is our legislators we send down. The NE part of the state, and I include the GTR in that, is its own place, with Tupelo as the regional capitol.
Simple answer, there are just more Ole Miss families in the Delta, than MSU. The middle class left long ago, so the ones who stayed have the means and ties to areas/land, and those are more likely to be Ole Miss folks, out there.
It "went to hell" long ago if you don't own big land and into ag or big money hunting. Why is this such a surprise? Why do people keep acting like (and be surprised by) it's CURRENTLY declining? It can't get any worse, and really hasn't for 30 years. Just varying levels of terrible.
Tourism is about the only thing that can save it, and that's limited. It's more about hunting and food IMO.
There are more Ole Miss families, but as I said, the MSU families are there, they are just going to Madison, whereas Ole Miss families seem to go mostly to Oxford and some to Madison. I guess it's just proximity to a decent sized city. Oxford is under an hour and a half to Memphis. Madison is 30 to 40 minutes to wherever you want to go in Jackson. Starkville is at least two hours from Memphis, Birmingham, and Jackson. I'd be curious whether there are any state families in the north delta areas decamping to Desoto County.
It has definitely gotten worse and can continue to get worse. The "cities" of the delta were declining, but it was a slow decline and they were somewhat holding their own as a lot of the small towns disappeared and some of the population of those small towns moved to the bigger towns in the Delta (while others just left all together). Then it was basically just Cleveland (because of DSU) and Greenwood (because of Viking) slowly declining, while everywhere else rapidly declined. As long as DSU is there, I guess Cleveland will be ok. Greenwood I don't think will be. It's a shame and the Delta has definitely had awful leadership and race issues have hurt them badly, but at the end of the day, I'm not sure why there should be anything there other than agriculture, which just doesn't support a lot of jobs anymore.
The Delta has been ___ for the 55 years of my life, but like Jxn, it hit bottom and starting digging with a vengeance. Cleveland was the Jewel of the Delta, but the "desegregation" of the public schools is putting the death knell in that.
Seems to me like the biggest decline already happened long ago, and it's been in roughly the same state for a while now. Some things, like Viking, caused temporary hiatus but I don't see the big difference anywhere in the Delta from 2000 to now.
Same with Jackson, ain't nothing really changed, been damn near rock bottom for years.
You can't really get any worse. You have a certain core group of people that won't ever leave.
Yep. I was raised in Columbus. Im sure it is the same now but Back in the day, Columbus gravitated towards Alabama. Tuscaloosa and Bham was the place to go shop. Also, Columbus cable tv carried a Bham TV station for years in addition to WCBI and WTVA. WCBI and the paper covered Alabama sports. on and on.
Not only is Mississippi seemingly the most divided up state ever (as in culturally, in different areas), but yeah, the lack of a true, formidable urban area sends Mississippians outside the state to spend all their money. You have Memphis, but I can't really complain about it because if not for Memphis, there'd be no booming Desoto County), NE MS which as you said does most of their shopping and such in Birmingham or Tuscaloosa. Everybody in SE MS goes to Mobile, the rest of the coast and SW MS goes to NOLA. I guess nowadays Gulfport/Biloxi is staving off some of that.
Not to mention the vacations to Gatlinburg, Gulf Shores, Destin, Smith Lake and Ozarks/Branson.
Thank the Lord for the casinos and fertile hunting land.
I had 3 roommates from the Delta while at MSU and I went home w/ them in the mid 80's often and wondered then why would anybody want to live there? I haven't been West of I-55 in years but if all of you say its only gotten worse then, man, I have no reason to go back
As someone who grew up in Clarksdale, attended high school in Natchez, lived in Starkville, Jackson, and now 20+ years on the Coast, I agree with damn near all of this. This state of roughly 3 million, is spread out to several regions, which are too often mutually isolated.
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I grew up in the Tupelo area. Before I went to MSU I had been to Columbus about twice. Tupelo is definitely the regional capital of northeast Mississippi/northwest Alabama. Growing up, if we needed major shopping or hospital care, it was ALWAYS Memphis. Even now, I have been to Cleveland exactly one time. I can't remember ever having been in Clarksdale. Natchez one time. Driven through McComb a lot when I lived in Houston, TX, but never spent time there. Now if you want to know about Van Vleet, Egypt, Bigbee, Eggville, or Houlka, I'm your man.
The biggest decline happened with automation, but it still continued to be a place that you could raise a family in for a long while after that. You had pockets of extreme poverty and dysfunction, but you also generally had a reasonably functional society along next to those pockets (or maybe more accurately you had pockets of funcctionality within the general poverty and dysfunction). It still wouldn't have been desirable for a lot of people because all those towns were small, but they were still places where you could find a job (even if the market was limited), raise a family, and have a functioning city government, decent private school (and some decent public schools through the 80's with Cleveland remaining decent until today), and not have to worry much about crime. All in all a decent quality of life if you wanted a smaller town atmosphere. I don't think you can say that about many (any?) places in the Delta now. Like in Jackson, the petty crime no longer stays in the bad parts of town. Lots of the private schools stopped being decent with many of them shutting down, meaning people from some small communities now had a thirty minute commute to get to a decent (maybe) private school. Just to give an example, I went to school with middle class people from Greenville, Leland, Indianola, Greenwood, Cleveland, and Clarksdale. I don't think any of those towns with the exception of possibly Greenwood and Cleveland have people come there that aren't coming back to family businesses. And in another 25 years (or less), I'm guessing Greenwood will be where Greenville is now, and Greenville will be where Indianola and Clarksdale are.
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Seems like it's been this way forever. The whole deal with people moving from rural towns to Madison/Brandon (or Oxford/Desoto, wherever) isn't unique to the Delta, that's a nationwide trend, slowed down really only by COVID.
Many of those Delta cities had a small industrial base of some sort that had jobs outside of agriculture but 99 percent of those have closed and so now you’re really seeing the decline accelerate.
Desoto County has a ton of people from the Delta. Many are State fans and Ole Miss too. Many of the people I know that are in their 30s and 40s have some sort of tie to the Delta.
I agree, I went to MDCC in the early 2000's and have gone back to the Delta a few times recently, and really didn't notice any difference. It's been a depressing place for a long time now.
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