National Register of Historic Places Inventory — Nomination Form: I. T. Montgomery House, Mound Bayou, Mississippi (NRHP ref. 76001092)

The founding document of the ERASED thread’s one town that was not destroyed.

Verified 2026-07-31. The NPS scan was pulled and read directly, not summarized. A web search returned this file under the OCR-garbled title “ilf : 9; >SpCJEjrY :AND SOCIALCONSCIENCE, 9a - American Ways of Life” — the document’s own header text, mangled. The subject was confirmed by opening it: NAME / HISTORIC: I. T. Montgomery House, CITY, TOWN: Mound Bayou, COUNTY: Bolivar, STATE: Mississippi, SPECIFIC DATES: 1887.

⚠️ This is a scanned 1976 typescript and its OCR is poor. The extracted text carries artifacts (Mound $ayou, 1. T. Montgomery, Jefferson Davis 1 idea). Every quotation below was checked against the surrounding text before being recorded. Do not lift OCR strings from this file without reading them in place.

The load-bearing passage

The nomination records the Louisville, New Orleans and Texas Railroad’s own stated reasoning for wanting Black settlers in the Delta, verbatim:

“It was the belief of railroad company officials that only members of the black race had the ability to adapt to life in a semi-tropical climate which was conducive to maleria.”

maleria is the document’s spelling and is reproduced exactly. A quotation reproduces its source’s errors. Do not correct it.

This is the mechanism the casefile turns on. The town was made possible by a racial-pseudoscience premise — that Black people were biologically suited to land white settlers believed would kill them. The same logic that condemns elsewhere is here the thing that opens the door.

The rest of the significance statement, as filed

“Located in the Mississippi Delta region of Bolivar County, the town of Mound Bayou was one of a number of black settlements which was established during the post-Reconstruction period. It represents one of many important attempts by blacks of that era to establish independent communities in which they could exercise self-government.”

On the predecessor settlement:

“Isaiah Thornton Montgomery and his cousin Benjamin Green were the slaves of the family of the Confederate President Jefferson Davis.”

The form places the earlier settlement at Davis Bend, “twenty miles south of Vicksburg on the Mississippi River,” established 1865 on the Brierfield plantation, and states it “survived for eighteen years” before recurring Mississippi floods drove the settlers to Vicksburg.

On the arrival:

“Many of the settlers of the former colony came to Mound Bayou in July 1887, and began to carve a town out of the wilderness and swampland.”

The form states the town was named for a large Indian mound at the convergence of two bayous draining the region.

⚠️ One claim in this document to check before repeating it

The form attributes the Davis Bend settlement idea to Jefferson Davis. The standard historiography attributes the Davis Bend experiment principally to Joseph Davis, Jefferson’s elder brother, who held Hurricane plantation and under whom Isaiah Montgomery served. This record reproduces what the federal form says and flags the discrepancy rather than silently correcting a primary document. Before any essay repeats the attribution, confirm it against a source on Davis Bend itself. Being wrong is correctable; quietly amending a primary is not.

Also in its bibliography, not yet obtained

The form’s partial bibliography names two items no digitized copy of which was located this pass:

• Charles Banks, Negro Town and Colony, Mound Bayou, Bolivar County, Mississippi; Opportunities Open to Negro Farmers and Settlers (Mound Bayou: Demonstrator Print).
• The Founding of Mound Bayou, Bolivar County, Mississippi, Semi-Centennial Celebration, July 11-17, 1937 (Cleveland: Cleveland Enterprise, 1937).

A search summary this pass conflated the Banks pamphlet’s imprint with the 1937 celebration’s dates. Both remain unobtained. Neither may be cited until a copy is read.