What China Grove is.

China Grove: it is a name possessed of both mortal and mythic pretentions. On its face, China Grove, Mississippi harkens to a real locale, a ghost town at a south Mississippi crossroads, with only an old slave-built clapboard Methodist Church and its adjoining cemetery, sitting in the middle of a long leaf pine plantation, as remnants of a once vital community. The earliest village on Magee’s Creek, China Grove’s post office was established on June 25, 1827, with the community consisting not only of the Methodist Church and several plantations but also grist mills, mercantile stores, and a cotton gin. Many a protracted meeting occurred here, and the local schools persisted, while the population slowly departed, lured by the wiles of Tylertown, eight miles to the southwest. The post office would be discontinued in 1921, and the town soon was considered “extinct.”

The name “China Grove” speaks to elemental qualities in the American South. Chinaberry trees (Melia azedarch), which were planted in a grove shading the old church in the 1820s, were a foreign species, native to Asia, introduced in this near-tropical climate, somehow surviving and even thriving. They were ornamental trees with sweet smelling lavender blossoms and yellow poisonous berries. Like the original settlers, soon to become “Southerners,” they were foreign born and exotic, but became as native as any natives.

There is also a spiritual China Grove for those who love literature and art, a respectful and thankful nod to one of this magazine’s patron saints, Eudora Welty (with Mark Twain and Ellen Gilchrist). One of her earliest masterpieces, Why I Live at the P. O., takes place in China Grove, Mississippi, “the next to smallest P. O. in the state of Mississippi.” Miss Welty was not one to focus on “real” small towns in her literature, but likely she picked up this Walthall County “ghost town” in her WPA travels. In 1975, she wrote to an inquirer that the “real” Banner, Mississippi did not inspire the imaginary town in Losing Battles. She commented: “I don’t knowingly use real place names unless I use the town as a real place—something big enough to be anonymous, like Memphis.” (Welty to Yancy, January13, 1975) But Welty’s China Grove is a haven for literature. Like her narrator/postmistress, we can find refuge at home, at China Grove, among our relatives and friends.