Delta Magazine: Deep Roots, Deep Delta Legacies

By Hank Burdine. Photography by Karen Pulfer Focht.

The story of two bicentennial Mississippi Delta plantations

For the Abbay-Leatherman and Stovall families, these farmlands and home places have been protected and held together for generations.
Treaty of Pontotoc
Acquiring Abbay and Leatherman Plantations
About the time of the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek in 1830, the Treaty of Pontotoc, 1832, and after the Indian Removal Act of 1828, removing the Five Civilized Tribes of Native Americans, the Choctaws, Chickasaws, Cherokees, Seminoles and Creeks, to the west, the Mississippi Delta, as we know it, was being defined. Land then could be bought from the state, or from Native Americans that had acquired title to their ancestral lands through terms and conditions of the respective treaties. The young country was on the move. There were dense bottomland hardwood forests to be cleared and cotton to be planted and civilization to be brought to the deep and fecund swamplands of the South. However, for thousands of years, it had been inhabited by indigenous native people; yet, it was soon to be known as our Mississippi Delta.
It is believed, according to Spanish records, that in May of 1541, Hernando Desoto first viewed the Mississippi River from atop an Indian mound south of Memphis. This mound is located due east of what was to become a major shipping point on the Mississippi River at a bend known as Commerce Landing. By 1841, Commerce Landing was the county seat of Tunica County, had a population of 5,000 people and was known to rival neighboring Memphis as a trading center. Vicksburg and Natchez shared top billings with Commerce Landing as river towns with the highest tonnage of shipped cotton. But Memphis, Vicksburg and Natchez sat atop bluffs and Commerce was nestled on the flat high bank of the great Mississippi River.
According to a decades-old article in Delta Review, a steam powered packet boat named Desoto operated a busy schedule up and down the river with Commerce as its home port. However, by 1844 the river began eating away at its banks and in Commerce, building after building fell into the swift current. The Western Bank of Commerce, that printed its own bills regionally known as “solid money,” soon closed their doors. By 1848 the county seat was moved 15 miles south to Austin, but that location was also threatened by the ever-changing river. Finally the town of Tunica became the county seat and remains as such today.
In 1832, identical twin brothers Richard and Anthony Abbay came from Nashville and bought land from the state and also from Chickasaw Indians that had received lands according to the treaty of Pontotoc, paying 50 cents an acre for the Indian lands. A sizable place was put together by the brothers and homes were built that later would also fall into the river. The Abbay brothers married the Compton sisters and when Anthony’s wife became disillusioned with the harsh, almost frontier Delta life and begged to return to the hills of Nashville, Anthony abided in her wishes and sold his land to his brother and moved away.
Richard Abbay had three sons and one daughter. One son died as a youth and another moved away. When Richard’s wife Mary died in childbirth with his one daughter, he bade his remaining son Richard Felix to never marry and he remained a bachelor his entire life. After the Civil War, Richard’s daughter, Mary Susan, met and married Dr. George Washington Leatherman from Woodville. Upon Dr. Leatherman’s untimely and early death, Mary Susan soon moved home to the plantation with her son, Samuel Richard Leatherman. When Richard Abbay died, his son Richard Felix entered into a partnership with his nephew S.R. Leatherman in 1893. The place came to be known, and is today, as the Abbay and Leatherman Plantation.
Additional acreage was added whenever the occasion arose until a sizable place had been put together. Never one to sell any land, Richard Abbay had the foresight to sell his cotton for gold instead of Confederate money when war broke out and buried it all in a rather large teapot on the place. After the war, and retrieving his loaded teapot, he was able to keep the farm together and even add more holdings. When one of his granddaughters died after receiving an early inheritance, Richard was forced to buy the family land back from her widower at an exorbitant price. Showing his dislike for his grandson-in-law, Richard Abbay left in his will for this particular man, “one dollar and my undying hatred.”
When S.R. Leatherman II decided to build a house he chose a location adjoining the Indian Mound from which Desoto first saw the mighty Mississippi River. He built a rambling Tudor-style home on a mound of dirt brought in next to the original Indian Mound. According to a poignant memoir by Carroll Seabrook Leatherman, Goodbye, Ole Miss, her great-grandmother-in-law, “an eccentric old lady who always dressed in black when not in bed with a migraine, refused to let her grandson build anything on the Indian Mound, believing that the spirits of the Indian dead resided there.” Currently the “Desoto” Mound is resplendent with huge oak and pecan trees and well-kept gardens adorning its sides.
The Abbay and Leatherman Plantation is still in the hands of the family with additional lands having been added throughout the years. Against the original Richard Abbay’s intent of never selling any land, but surely with a consequential wink of a good business deal, a small parcel of the original plantation was sold. A part of the Chickasaw lands, close to the river and deeded by the mark of an X, sits underneath the elaborate Sam’s Town Casino.
Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek
Seeds of Stovall Farms
Some remember a historical marker sign that used to stand at the intersection of Highways 61 and 450 south of Shaw and close by the small town of Choctaw. It marked the southern boundary of the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek of 1830 that deeded away lands held by the Choctaw Indian Tribe. One farm that goes back to that treaty is Stovall Farms, northwest of Clarksdale along the Mississippi River.
William Oldham came to the Mississippi Delta from South Carolina to cut timber about 1830. According to Stovall family papers, he acquired several tracts of land for $1.25 an acre and began clearing the timber and farming cotton. He married Nancy Carver, however, she decided to move back to South Carolina, freeing her servants and giving each of them 40 acres of land and building them a church. Some took her surname and certain tracts of Carver land remain on the County tax rolls today. In 1866, their granddaughter married Confederate Colonel William Howard Stovall II, a Memphis lawyer who had served as adjutant to the 154th Tennessee Regiment and they moved to Coahoma County to run the plantation.
The Stovall family has long served their country beginning with William Howard Stovall Sr. serving in the War of 1812. W.H. Stovall III graduated from Yale in 1918 and went on to serve as a Lieutenant in the U.S. Army Air Corps, 13th Air Squadron during WWI. He is credited with six aerial victories and received the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Victory Medal, the Legion of Merit with Oak Leaf Cluster, the Bronze Star, the Order of the British Empire, European Theatre of Operations Ribbon with five battle stars, the French Legion d’Honneur and the Croix de Guerre. As a decorated fighter pilot, Howard Stovall returned home to the Delta and became a well-respected plantation manager and businessman. He returned to active duty as a Major after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, soon to become a Colonel serving as Deputy Chief of Staff for the U.S. Strategic Air Force during WWII in England with several of his prior WWI comrades. He retired as a Brigadier General. His son William Howard Stovall IV followed in his daddy’s footsteps, but was killed in action after downing two enemy aircraft while engaging seven over Bergsteinfurt, Germany. He is buried in Margraten, Holland. While not defending our country, Howard Stovall III was at home on the farm. His land stewardship and pre-imminence in conservation practices garnered him much recognition including the Delta Council Achievement Award for 1967-68. He served as President of Cotton Council International and was awarded the 50th Anniversary Medal for Contributions to American Agriculture by the Federal Land Bank Association. He was the inspiration for the character Colonel Harvey Stovall in the book and movie “Twelve O’Clock High” starring Gregory Peck. Cotton, corn and soybeans have not been the only thing raised on Stovall Farms; the blues have been known to raise a ruckus on weekends also. McKinley Morganfield, better known as Muddy Waters, spent most of his first 30 years living in a hand-hewn cypress log cabin and working on the farm. It was here in 1941 that Alan Lomax came south to the Delta and recorded field workers for the Library of Congress. Soon after being recorded, Muddy moved to Chicago and established himself as the King of Chicago Blues. The log cabin has been moved and now sits in the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale.
Muddy’s induction into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1981 and the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame in 1987, share a stone monument along with a Mississippi Blues Trail marker on the site of his home at the edge of a pecan orchard and cotton field. Carrying on Muddy’s tradition, William Howard Stovall V resides in Memphis where he has been deeply involved in blues revitalization and awareness as past head of the Blues Foundation and currently a partner in the Resource Entertainment Group.
Today, Stovall Farms continues under family ownership and management with Gil Stovall overseeing all operations of Stovall Farms. The almost 200-year-old plantation stands out as a prime example of good stewardship and land supervision. Stovall Farms has hosted numerous distinguished field trips including conservation and innovative technological farm practice tours. Farm Bureau and conservation districts have cited Stovall Farms as a model for pioneering state of the art farm practices. Utilizing precision land leveling and conservative irrigation practices, modern drainage techniques have been implemented with on farm tail water recovery and irrigation water storage methods using filter strips and cover crops. Stovall Farms is indeed a model plantation and quite a beautiful place to behold. The Lonesome Dove Sporting Club hosts an annual dove hunt on well-appointed fields such as the Dancing Rabbit Creek Field adjacent to Stovall family relative’s original homestead “Seven Chimneys Farm,” circa 1840.
History, heritage, culture and dirt run deep in the Delta. The rich land and founding families intertwine like the fast-reaching and far-roaming muscadine vines that ran rampant through the verdant swamps and ridges of our flat land. What an interesting time it is that we live in to be able to realize this history and legacy and to conserve it for future generations.

Scott Coopwood, publisher of Delta Magazine.

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