Jackson Jambalaya

Heroes. Thank you so much for your service and dedication to our State.

Good luck!

We visited the distillery a couple months ago...Cool Spot. Best of luck to them and the booze is good

Maybe Bennie will take note and actually do something for the Delta? Na, probably not.

Good folks!

What happens when the Colemans realize the local culture, work ethic, demographics, crime, income and reliance on government programs are not going to change...no matter what?

They can paint a mural on every deserted storefront in town and somebody will splash dookie on them before nightfall. Then after a roar of disapproval disappears after lasting three hours, things will return to normal.

As a corollary, let's switch channels over to Canton (similar statistical comparison) where Rich Grain Distilling Co. was the first legal distillery in Mississippi, founded in 2016, opened to much fanfare after two years of publicity, magazine shots and television coverage.

David Rich was the founder and owner who produced the first legally distilled bourbon in Mississippi. Their flagship bourbon was claimed to "age uniquely in Mississippi's hot and humid climate".

Mr. Rich planned to put Canton on the global bourbon-map and the business closed in 2020.

Canton is still Canton and in many ways is just a larger version of Rosedale only there's a McDonald's and a Popeye's.

Heroes? He'll disappear and try to write a book in three years. lol

6:41, he's FROM there (and thus knows what to expect). And, having gone to college in the next-town-over (& having a friend whose life was DESTROYED by buying and gentrifying an apartment building in Canton: a town on the shortlist of 'World's Most Evil Places'), I can tell you that Rosedale people are nothing like Canton people. Rosedale people, regardless of race, are LOVELY.

But I'm perplexed. First, I heard the telltale upwardly-mobile Baptist hyper-pronunciation of 'y'. Then, I heard "granddad". Then, I heard "...at eight years old..." (unforgivably-bad syntax).

None of these 'tells' (unless Mr. Coleman is being disingenuously-folksy) mesh with his first marriage into the family we, at Delta State, viewed with the same awe with which one regards the Rothschilds. (in fact, their being Pauline deRothschild's cousins - and Wallis Warfield Simpson Windsor's cousins, was in the standard briefing one got, first semester, as an Economics major - by way of telling us that Delta State wasn't nearly as podunk as we might have expected it to be. "A tornado may have landed you here, honey, but you're in Oz, now, so stand-up-straight, grasp the possibilities, and stop chewing with your mouth open, 'cause we've got Windsors and Rothschilds... and Bobbie Gentry's little sister went here, one summer. (for a little ragammufin like me - up from nothing and nowhere, that talk provided more of an identity than you can imagine)

And the current, very-classy, very lovely wife also seems unlikely to be married to someone who'd say "granddad".

Wasn't his mother the head of the Republican Women, in Jackson? ...helping anchor the Belhaven District, at a critical time? I've been searching my memory, since reading the above coverage. Was he involved in the upgrading of Ravennaside (a postbellum Natchez Victorian - free of the curse borne by slavery-era mansions)? The house had 'The Mona Lisa of Floors' - but then came to have "The best curtains in Natchez" (Best curtains in all of Mississippi, if you ask me: maybe his years as a Washington lobbyist providing the proximity - the connection to workrooms in DC, where really fine swaggy curtains are in continual demand. Or did the curtains come via the departed "Buzz" creature, who also owned Ravennaside during that era (and who was always trying to sell you a Rolls Royce, if you didn't run fast-enough)?

Zara, Charlotte, Isobel? Eventually, I'll remember the name of the one who'd have ordered those curtains...

I agree with @6:41. Great things are being done by the Colemans. I tip my hat to them. But I can’t imagine any of this being profitable or good business. It’s more like charity (and there ain’t nothing wrong with that). The people in that area aren’t going to straighten up and start working jobs. The Colemans better accept EBT at whatever business they open.

7:29 pm - typing while blasted on cheap gin is fun huh?

Great post, 7:29, I almost made it through the second paragraph

@7:29 - I thought this discussion was about Bourbon, not THC and there you go off on some magic carpet ride over sandbars and tow-barges. Lord, what a trip you're on.

Not sure what the end expectation is of the Colemans, and being from the Delta myself, and having spent a few nights on the Delta State campus as well as having lived a couple of miles from Canton for a couple of years...I can assure you my experience with each of those surpasses yours, with or with the drugs you're on.

Confused about how a small distillery is going to save the Delta? But it sure is a feel-good story.

It just gives the locals more liquor to steal.

Look at the first sentence of this article above. There's a reason you don't see many major employers in the Delta. Most city and county officials don't understand economic development, nor do they care. Elected officials will greet site selectors with expectations, if not outright demands, of what you intend to do for them. I saw it firsthand, even in public meetings, where major companies proposing to locate there were met with demands for promises to favor one race of people to the exclusion of another race of people. One CEO appearing before a Delta city council years ago to propose locating a manufacturing facility there was peppered with questions and demands that the facility he proposed should hire a certain race of people for the highest paying jobs there. This CEO explained that all their employees, including the ones working in the highly technical nature of their business, required they hire by qualifications, and that was the priority no matter what race they were. He quietly folded his books up, walked out, and today that major facility (employing hundreds) is thriving in the Golden Triangle area, not the Delta. That's just one example, but that CEO got a glimpse of the ugliness, and he got out of there, but fast.

...hmmmmm.... I'd stopped the video, when Coleman said, "...at 8-years-old...". However, spurred-on by critiques of my earlier post, I tried to continue with the video. Had to stop, again, when HER evolving accent proved to have followed the same trajectory as her husband's. Seems their roots are similar. And frankly, all the vague & noble language - on the subjects of construction and real estate, where it does not belong - proved wearying. So, I stopped, again.

But Cornpone sells, even if it's hidden, on the STORYBOARD, behind a mythos of wealth & sophistication only masquerading as folksiness & humility.

Meanwhile, snippets of memory arrived, and a few emails confirmed - a friend qvelling over a former "blondest and most-stacked girl at Ole Miss" ("Polled Hereford royalty, with their own auction barn, whose grandfather revived their plantations, using German officers as slave labor..."), at one of those hot, miserable garden weddings, somewhere around there: specifically her wearing a platinum & carved aquamarine torq, and was it custom, or just Bulgari's usual pedestrian 'High Jewelry'? (or were the moment and memory more a product of pre-coma heat exhaustion, than anything else?)

The torq was all we cared about, but I also got to hear about the 1960s Ole Miss power triumvirate, involving: the torq-wearer; the granddaughter of a titled Spanish nobleman/Delta PADRON (who apparently imported/brokered replacement fieldhands from several Mediterranean nations: see 'Il Gattopardo', I suppose, if you need a mental picture of a Padron); and a girl whose family owned THE Bourbon label most revered at Ole Miss and beyond. Move over, Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus!

...things going so full-circle: Bourbon to Bourbon, in two generations! Remember that moment, in Tennessee Williams' 'Summer & Smoke', when some creature (imported by the Padron) is telling the Protagonist, about growing up in a hut with a dirt floor? That movie can only depict Rosedale, in its time of prosperity (although similarly-prosperous Crystal Springs, also had a doc who deliberately got women hooked on opiates. And Tennessee Williams slept-around so much, he got material from everywhere).

But emails inform, that in the '70s, a committee sought to revitalize Rosedale, by painting the town's facades in vibrant colors. Delta State's Art Department was consulted. Not sure what happened, but 'Nina' (rhymes with 'Myna'), the pretty-blonde-in-charge, went on to be involved, somehow, in the Jackson Metro's flight destination exurbs' mansion-building.

Maybe 20 years back, someone else was going to reshape Rosedale's vacant buildings into artists' lofts. My source wonders who, in a state where duck prints and Civil War lithographs are the only "art" which doesn't threaten the masculinity of the menfolk, who would have been doing the buying of all that art? Then, again, Duck Print Makers need production facilities, too.

"America's Duck Print Capital!" Has a nice ring to it.

Unless I'm seriously mistaken, 12:29 must live in Greenwood.

"Yes, Virginia...medical cannabis is now available in Mississippi. Just add two-fingers bourbon in a Dixie cup and an expired bag of Fritos."

The more I read about the Colemans, the more I think I must be on that Credit Union thread.

12:29, what you say, is acutely accurate. And the situation has been that way, since George Spivey's father, in the '60s, closed-down his mills in Helena, Arkansas, due to government interference. George, with an engineering degree, became THE Decorator for the North Delta - from Helena to the Chi Omega House at Ole Miss. I'm remembering that, because Spivey took a couple of abandoned storefronts, in Clarksdale-adjacent Lyon, and turned them into his home & shop. It was a day trip destination, as was McCarty's Pottery: something interesting to do with a rundown old place, that people would come from everywhere, to see. Spivey's was a model, probably subliminally, for what the Colemans are doing. And it was nearly half-a-century IN THE PAST.

Stories of businesses destroyed by the government's "Great Society" initiatives, can be heard, about families from Vicksburg to Memphis - lots and lots of them from Greenville, which used to have all sorts of factories/plants/manufacturers. But unlike Spivey, most of those families just LEFT.

They left for regions where the race/percentage/quota was not STACKED AGAINST THEM. One moves to the places where the percentages are best. If you're forced to hire a certain percentage, then...

One family landed in the Appalachian foothills of the Piedmont Atlantic region, where the percentages WERE great. Freed of Mississippi labor, they prospered. Now, they snap-up Delta farmland, which they never intend to farm, themselves.

But here's a scary NEW thought. The new cars are designed to spy/control/incarcerate their supposed owners. Cell phones are similar, now. And phones interact with cars - and with LOCAL law enforcement... and AI.

You've seen the scandal about the arrested Delta Sheriffs. You've read, here on Jackson Jambalaya, about the crooked little town in Alabama: the one you don't want to go anywhere NEAR.

Do you want such sheriffs, and officials in such towns, while you're just driving-through, invading (AI makes it so easy...) your cell phone and your car's computer and all the personal data they can grab? What do you THINK they'll do with information like that? ...sizing you up as an easy mark with assets to steal... ...seeing that you're an attractive young woman headed back to school... They can JAM outgoing signals, you know.

Not going to any quaint old places, anymore, unless I'm traveling en-convoy.