If the old saying, “a picture is worth a thousand words” is true, then the Luther Hamilton Photograph Collection is worth a million words. The collection includes nearly 1,000 photographs of mainly Copiah County documents, its people and activities from the late 1900s to the mid-1940s. The images are varied, some are rare and each one tells a story.
Photographs of vegetable picking, packing and shipping, for example, preserve a time in which few of those living can say they have experienced. Some of the family names will sound familiar - Augustus Lotterhos and Bryant Wesley Mathis (known as “The Cabbage King”) - are a few. Building no longer extant serve as re- minders of what once was.
Luther Myles Hamilton, Sr. (“LM”) was born in Wesson on March 5, 1869, to Benjamin and Amanda C. Terry. He married Lizzie Davidson, and they had four children – Hazel Hamilton Odom, Merle H. Ramsey, Edythey Hamilton Todd and L.M. Hamilton, Jr.
L.M. was a photographer for many years before his death in 1944. He owned and operated a portrait studio out of a tent in Crystal Springs equipped with a portable darkroom. His house was where ABB’s (formerly Kuhlman Electric) entrance is at the intersection of Lee Avenue and East Railroad.
Luther, Jr. (1912-1994) collected the studio’s and family’s photographs, intending to publish a photographic history of Crystal Springs. They were not published, but, instead, a lot of them were donated to the Mississippi Department of Archives and history, where they have been digitalized as the Luther Hamilton Collection.
Due to the selfless efforts of the Hamilton family, the world now has access to almost a thousand photo- graphs that take us to a time when there were no televisions, no computers and no cellphones - days when Flag Day (1901) and the first tomato day celebrations were events for everyone to attend. Farming was a way of life, and downtowns and depots were the centers of attraction.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Reprinted from A Shared History: Copiah County, Mississippi 1823-1823, including articles written by Paul C. Cartwright, Tricia Nelson and Gene Horton compiled and edited by Paul C. Cartwright.
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