COLL TOWN— A long forgotten spot clustering around Clark Bayou, north of Escatawpa, might have been one of Jackson County’s industrial beehives, if the combination of people and current events had not changed its destiny.

    The name of this place— now an area of scattered homes off Mississippi 613 in the shadow of Mississippi Power Company plant Victor Daniel, was once Coll Town.  But in view of its early reputation, it would have been more correctly spelled Coaltown.  Until the early 1900s this was one of Jackson County’s charcoal burning centers and schooners would sail up Clark Bayou to be loaded with this popular fuel.

    Coll Town was also the site of one of the county’s first shipyards and later a thriving tung oil business.  In recent years, a few other industries have been eyeing this rural spot.

     In 1838, New York native Ebeneezer Clark, who came into Mississippi via Mobile, Ala., established a boatyard on the bayou that has since carried his name.  Here flat-bottomed schooners, some as long as 75 feet, were built from native cypress.

     A 1943 article in the Ingalls News on early shipbuilding says that Clark specialized in not only building a variety of vessels, but in ship repair.  Eventually his business grew and he opened branches in Mobile and New Orleans.

     “There are some ships sunk there,” said Frederick Norman Scott of Hurley, who grew up in the Coll Town area.  In his youth, an old man showed him where one was deliberately sunk while being built during the Civil War.  “They scuttled a two-masted one, rather than letting the Yankees have it.  They chopped off the mast and scuttled it.  It’s still there.  You could see it when the water was clear,” Scott said.  “There’s a lot of history here.”  The shipyard began to decline after Clark died in the 1850s and there was little interest among the people who trickled into the area to lure industry.  They seemed to prefer the quiet, rural existence.

     Scott said that Clark’s land was on both sides of the bayou and the old cemetery in which several family members are buried in still there, hidden away on a point of land behind the Mississippi Power Company plant.  Family information gathered by Betty Clark Rodgers of Pascagoula says that at least five graves of members of the Clark and Burleson families are in the old cemetery.  Clark married Sarah Burleson, the daughter of Aaron Burleson and Mary Ann Camp Burleson, who were among the early settlers in the Three Rivers-Clark Bayou area.

     The families reportedly moved from Mobile to Jackson County about 1829.  Stories handed down in the Clark family say that while they were living in this desolate spot, Clark provided probably the first school in the area by hiring a teacher and setting up a classroom for his children on his property.

      County school records show that during the 1880s Coll Town’s only school was held at the Latter Day Saints Church.  From the 1890s until the 1920s, the children were educated in a one-room school house on John Robinson’s property, south of Wildwood Road.  The school was called Robinson School in his honor.  One of the early teachers was Ottilie Swan.  When schools in the county were consolidated, the children were taken to Escatawpa.

      There were few people living in the vicinity when Clark built his shipyard on the bayou.  Frederick Rogers was a landowner in the early 1830s.  Families who bought property around Coll Town in the area in the 1860s and 1870s were Samuel B. Thompson, S.T. Lyons, John Robinson, J.H. Canady and Fred Lehrkind.

     Later came the Porters, Mizelles, Croniers, Cunninghams, Vices, McQuarries, Goffs, Youngs, Millers, McDowells, and others.

    About 1912, several Polish families came from the Chicago, Ill., area.  Prominent were Waurznia Chevalny, Alojzy, and Toefil Piskorz, Martin Kasprazak, and Josef Chwalny, who served the area as a blacksmith.  Some of the Poles anglicized their difficult-to-pronounce names, like Kasprazak, which became Kasby, or Kaspar.

     The community has always been closely associated with another nearby settlement called Wilson Springs.  “There was a Wilson family living there –Raymond and Sam Wilson was their mother,” Scott said.  Ben Vice donated land in the Wilson Springs area.  “The springs are down a hill.  You can see them boiling out,” he said.

     Scott’s maternal grandfather, John B. Porter, a Jackson County native, bought about 80 acres around Indiantown Road in 1887.  One of Porter’s several daughters married Frederick Norman Scott Sr., a minister and educator, who came into Jackson County from Meridian, Miss., about 1900.  Frederick Norman Scott Jr. said his father was 21 when he saw 16-year-old Ellen Celeste Porter walking up a hill from the springs with a bucket of water in both hands.  He decided to stay awhile.

     After the couple married, they lived on the Porter place.  Later they moved to George County and Soso, where Scott taught.  “George County was formed while we were there and my father was one of the founders,” Scott said.

     For a time, the elder Scott was principal of Central School in George County.  But the family moved back to Jackson County about 1917, when Scott bought 141 acres across from the Porters, that was once owned by John Grierson.  In the dark days of 1929, Scott Sr. sold out and moved to Pascagoula.

     “The houses were few and far between and there weren’t many cars traveling up the highway,” Scott recalls.

    “I could lie down in the road and look at the clouds and go to sleep.  I wouldn’t have to worry, nothing would run over me,” he said.  The closet stores were in Escatawpa.  “The mail rider might come by,” he said.

    Between 1903 and 1908, Frederick Norman Scott Sr. ran a post office that he named Hulda after the wife of Oscar Tillman.  A few years before, there was another post office named Canady.  Green E. Canaday, the postmaster, kept the mail coming and going here between 1898 and 1901.

    Today the Canaday property is the site of the Sea Chick aquaculture plant, where hybrid bass are raised.

   Scott said that some of the Canady family are buried on the property above the branch.  Another old burial ground is in the vicinity is at Four Mile Creek Baptist Church, he said.

   Most of the families of Coll Town did some “patch farming” in the early part of this century, but the breadwinners earned a living from timbering, the sawmills and charcoal burning.  “I did a little of it myself,” Scott recalls.  His uncle, Andrew Cunningham, then a very old man, taught him the art as a youngster, he said.  “All the people burned charcoal, around Four Mile Creek and Wilson Springs, on this side of the Escatawpa River.  We did anything we could to make a living,” he said.

    In the mid-1920s, the late Henry Bryant of Waukesha, Wis., bought large tracts of land to grow tung trees, which were native to China.  There was a great demand then for the tung oil that was produced from the nuts for use as a paint base.  But after several years, the waning of demand for the product and a devastating freeze, Bryant decided to give up his business, said his widow, Margaret Bryant, who lives in Gulf Hills.

   The newest try at industry around Coll Town is SeaChick, which marked its first anniversary on Feb. 9 and is looking forward to future growth and expansion.  SeaChick head Donald Robohm says the area is ripe for industrial development

    Both this new endeavor and the huge power plant that dominates the skyline along Clark Bayou, once the site of Ebeneezer Clark’s old shipyard, are reminders of what could have been and what yet is to be.

   The population is still small at Coll Town, although people don’t refer to it as that now.  But it is not as sparse as in days gone by.  And thousands of cars daily whiz by on the modern four-lane highway that used to be the dirt road where a young Frederick Norman Scott once napped in the sunshine.