Bell school house as Wilburn Sudduth remembered
Many of the small communities in the county sprang up around the one-room schools that were established throughout the area.
One such community is Bell School House, north of Starkville on Highway 389.
Settlers came to the area even before the treaty with the Indians ceded the land to the federal government. After the county was established, more settlers migrated from Tennessee and the Carolinas.
Judge T. B. Carroll’s book on the history of the county says there were two physicians in the community in the 1850s – Dr. John B. Sanders who settled there about 1853 and Dr. Jeff Hale, who practiced there for seven years before his death in the late 1850s.
Carroll also says the first homicide in Beat 2 occurred in the Bell School House community about 1855, Richard Freeland killed Mistress Tom Maters at a dance. He claimed the shot was accidental and he was indicted for involuntary manslaughter and served a short sentence in the county jail. At the outbreak of the Civil War, he was killed when lightening struck a stand of farms near him.
The little community also had an interdenominational church, Pearson Chapel Union Church, which was established by the Rev. Bob Pearson, a Presbyterian minister in Starkville, who conducted services alternately with other ministers of the area.
Wilburn Sudduth, whose grandfather John F. Sudduth, came to the community from South Carolina, said at one time there were 17 molasses mills in the community. Cotton was the chief crop and later dairying became a profitable business with as many as 15 dairies operating at one time.
Sudduth recalled hard times when his father would take a wagonload of eggs packed in cottonseed for safety to sell in town for 5 cents a dozen. “At times, if it hadn’t been for the plentiful wild game around, a lot of people would have starved,” he said.
Sudduth also recalled that many of the landowners cut down their oak and pine trees and made crossties that they hauled to the rail crossing at Waddell. There they sold them for 10 cents a stick to the Columbus and Greenville Railroad Co., which was building a line through the northern section of the county.
The first post office to serve the area was in Cedar Bluff, which was in Oktibbeha County until that section was relegated to Clay County. Later, W. H. Sudduth ran a post office in his store before 1890.
The Woffords operated a cotton gin for many years. When Sudduth was growing up, there were about 17 white and 50 black families in the Bell School House community.
Today, in 1983, there is but one molasses mill, the community center and a store.
A couple of years ago Sudduth sold 284 acres of land in the community to the Pushmataha Council of the Boy Scouts as the site for Camp Seminole.
The camp is on land that used to belong to G. G. Dillard, a lawyer who was one of the three writers of the first Code of Law of the State of Mississippi. He was also ambassador to Ecuador under President Grover Cleveland.