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Ripley,
Mississippi has a population of about 5000.
It is the
seat of Tippah County, in the northeastern part of the
state. The Tennessee state line is about 20 miles to the
north, straight up Highway 15. If you take Highway 4 and
then Highway 30 to the east, you will come to the
Alabama line in about 45 miles. Tupelo, Mississippi, a
community of about 35,000 and the seat of Lee County, is
40 miles to the southeast. The closest city is Memphis,
Tennessee, about 75 miles to the northwest.
The
First Monday Sale and Trade Days (generally known as
“First Monday”) has been part of Ripley’s community life
since 1893. Originally held on the first Monday of every
month, it now takes place on the weekend preceding the
first Monday. The event attracts hundreds of vendors,
some of whom are professionals who visit Ripley as a
regular part of their travels on the Southern flea
market circuit. Others are amateurs who set up booths
more for fun than profit; most of this latter group sell
their wares only at Ripley. The standard wisdom is that
you can find anything you want at First Monday (and a
lot you probably don’t want but might buy anyway). Items
offered for sale or trade include sunglasses, guinea
fowl, videotapes, baby strollers, sweet potatoes, bumper
stickers, shotguns, porch swings, worn-out farm
implements, dolls, microwave ovens, dogs, T-shirts,
artificial floral arrangements, and just about
everything in between. Thousands of people flock to
Ripley on First Monday weekends, eager to trade, buy,
talk, and gawk. They come from throughout the deep South
and often from much farther away. On July 31, 1999 there
were cars from Texas, Missouri, Ohio, Arizona, Indiana,
and New York in the parking lot, as well as from
Mississippi and surrounding states.
Originally held on Ripley’s courthouse square, First
Monday has changed locations several times over the
years. At first, it enjoyed the support of both the
town’s business community and local government. Hoping
to profit from all the rural people coming to town on
Trade Day, most Ripley merchants designated the first
Monday of the month as a special “Grand Bargain Day.”
The county helped out by having the sheriff’s office
hold auctions of stray livestock and other unclaimed
property from the courthouse steps. Before long, though,
the congestion created by the monthly influx of people,
animals, and wagons began to outweigh the Trade Day’s
advantages (as far as the merchants were concerned), and
sometime during the 1910s, First Monday relocated to a
site a few blocks off the square. In the 1940s, because
of noise and sanitation concerns, it moved out of
Ripley’s business district altogether, to the
intersection of Highways 4 and 15, a quarter mile or so
downhill from the square. Shortly after that, probably
in the early 1950s, First Monday relocated again, this
time to the Tippah County Fairgrounds, about a mile
south on Highway 15. It settled in its present location,
even farther south on Highway 15, in 1978.
The present First Monday grounds are about two miles
south of downtown Ripley, at what was once a drive-in
movie theater on the east side of Highway 15. The
unpaved parking lot is right off the highway. At each of
several entrances, teenagers collect $1.50 from those
who want to park there. (Some people prefer to park for
free on the highway’s western shoulder, despite the
possibility of being towed.) Across the parking lot are
the sales grounds--an oval-shaped fifty acres with
hundreds of booths arranged in gently curving rows. The
ground is covered with caliche; this makes the site
dusty when it’s dry and glaringly bright in the summer
sun, but it also prevents the place from becoming too
muddy when it rains. The walkways between the booths are
often crowded with people: couples, families, cruising
teenagers, gangs of children, tourists, working people,
and retirees roam from booth to booth, always looking,
sometimes stopping to talk or bargain with vendors,
occasionally making a purchase. Scattered throughout are
refreshment stands where you can get such standard
American fare as hamburgers, corn dogs,
sausage-on-a-stick, french fries, popcorn, ice cream,
and soft drinks. (No alcoholic beverages are served at
First Monday.) Foods with a more Southern flavor include
pork rinds, boiled peanuts, fried pies, sweet tea, and
fresh-squeezed lemonade. For those who want to get in
out of the weather when they eat, there is the Trader's
Inn, a cafeteria-style restaurant that offers hearty
breakfasts, as well as “dinner” (served in the middle of
the day) and supper in the Southern “meat & three”
tradition.
As
with any long-standing tradition, First Monday has gone
through many changes over the years. At first, it was
primarily a “trade day”--“an old hound dog for an old
single barrel shotgun or plow tools for a mule,” as one
life long resident of Ripley describes it--at which
little or no money changed hands. This was largely out
of necessity, since most turn-of-the-century farmers in
northeast Mississippi were cash-poor in the extreme.
Such “trading” is now pretty much a thing of the past at
First Monday, though even as recently as the 1960s and
’70s, some old-timers disdained cash sales for the more
subtle art of barter. One Ripley native remembers trying
to buy a shotgun at First Monday from a man who was
willing to negotiate a trade but wouldn’t even think
about taking cash. Someone else recalls an elderly
farmer in overalls waving a large pipe wrench over his
head while walking the grounds and shouting, “Who will
trade me a billy goat for this pipe wrench? I need a
good billy goat, who needs a good pipe wrench?” There is
also an old First Monday story, probably apocryphal,
about a man who went to First Monday with a shotgun to
trade. First he traded it for a hunting dog; a little
while later, he traded the dog for a sewing machine.
After a few more trades, he wound up with a shotgun.
Only after getting home did he realize it was the same
shotgun he had started the day with. True or not, this
story hints at the passion among some at First Monday
for trading. Today, even though price is often open to
negotiation, nearly all First Monday business is
transacted in cash. Some people mourn this change.
In
1999, at the suggestion of U.S. Senator Thad Cochran,
First Monday was documented by The University of
Mississippi's Center for the Study of Southern Culture
for inclusion in a Library of Congress bicentennial
project know as “Local Legacies.” David Wharton,
director of documentary projects and assistant professor
of Southern Studies at the Center, along with folklorist
and oral historian Wiley Prewitt, Jr. and graduate
assistant Donna Buzzard, visited Ripley nine times in
1999 to record First Monday as a “Local Legacies”
project to be featured in bicentennial activities at the
Library of Congress this spring. Under Library of
Congress guidelines, a local legacy is a “traditional
activity, event or area of creativity that merits being
documented for future generations”-- a standard which
Wharton said Ripley’s First Monday Sale and Trade Days
readily met. “It’s a contemporary version of what
commercial transactions in rural society were like in
1900,” said Wharton. “First Monday is a part of
Mississippi culture that goes back more than a hundred
years and is alive and well today.”
Sixty-nine of Wharton’s First Monday photographs have
become a permanent exhibition at Ripley's Tippah County
Museum. Officials from the Center for the Study of
Southern Culture, including Center Director Dr. Charles
Reagan Wilson, Associate Professor of History and
Southern Studies Dr. Ted Ownby, and Wharton, were in
Ripley on January 22, 2000, for a special slide preview
of the project. In addition to comments by Wilson and
Ownby and Wharton’s slide presentation, the program
included a welcome by Ripley Mayor Louis Davis and short
talks by folklorist and oral historian Wiley Prewitt,
Jr.; Tippah County Museum Curator Odalene Coley; Ripley
librarian and local historian Tommy Covington, and Jerry
Windham, son of First Monday proprietor Wayne Windham.
After the program, the crowd walked a block to the
Museum, where they viewed the photographs firsthand.
“This was our first exhibit of this kind,” museum
curator Odalene Coley said. “It's extremely well done
and very professional. We’ve had many compliments on
it.”
All photographs ©1999 by David Wharton. |
Ripley
Trade Days
