MISSISSIPPI 



3844 



MISSISSIPPI 



for a general advance of the people through 

 the scientific and commercial, as well as the 

 moral and religious, benefits of Christian civili- 

 zation. Protestant missionaries work under the 

 direction of and are supported by their various 

 Church boards, but aim, as rapidly as possible, 

 to make the native churches self-supporting. 

 Their success is illustrated by the financial re- 

 port for 1914: though the American Protestant 

 contributions to work in foreign lands amounted 

 to seventeen millions of dollars, the native con- 



verts in their missions gave a sum equal to one- 

 fourth of that amount. M.A.H. 



Related Subjects. The following missionaries 

 are given special treatment in these volumes : 



Augustine, Saint 

 Boniface, Saint 

 Edwards, Jonathan 

 Eliot, John 

 Grenfell, Wilfred T. 

 Hennepin, Louis 

 Joliet, Louis 

 Judson, Adoniram 



Livingstone, David 

 Marquette, Jacques 

 Patrick, Saint 

 Paul, Saint 

 Smet, Peter John de 

 Whitman, Marcus 

 Wilson, John 

 Xavier, Francisco 



THE STORY OF MISSISSIPPI 



JSSISSIPPI, mis i sip' i, popularly 

 known as the BAYOU STATE, a south-central 

 state of the American Union, and one of the 

 Gulf states, named after the mighty river that 

 borders it on the west. This name is derived 

 from two Indian words, missi sepe, which mean 

 great river, or, literally, father oj waters. As its 

 flower, Mississippi has chosen the magnolia. 



Size and Location. Mississippi, with an area 

 of 46,665 square miles, of which 303 square 

 miles are water, ranks thirty-first among the 

 states in size. The state nearest to it in area is 

 Pennsylvania. Its extreme length from north 

 to south is 330 miles; its extreme width is 188 

 miles, and its average width is about 150 miles. 

 It has a coast line of eighty-five miles. In ad- 

 dition to the mainland Mississippi includes a 

 number of islands, namely, Ship Horn, Cat, 

 Petit Bois and others, lying in the Mississippi 

 Sound. 



Its People. With 1,797,114 inhabitants in 

 1910, Mississippi ranks twenty-first among the 

 states. The estimated population January 1, 

 1917, was 1,964,122. It has an average of about 

 41.5 persons to the square mile. In the period 

 from 1900 to 1910 it increased its population by 

 245,844, a gain of 15.8 per cent. This is about 

 the rate of increase shown by all the Southern 

 states with large negro populations. Of the 

 population in 1910, 43.7 per cent were whites, 

 56.2 per cent were negroes, as against 41.3 per 

 cent whites and 58.5 per cent negroes in 1900. 

 Mississippi has a larger percentage of negro 

 population than any other state in the Union, 



but the state that has the largest number of 

 negroes is Georgia. The foreign-born popula- 

 tion, as in all other Southern states, is very 

 small, numbering only 0.5 per cent of the total 

 population. 



By far the greatest number of the people of 

 the state live under rural conditions. Only 11.5 

 per cent (7.7 per cent in 1900) live in towns 

 of 2,500 inhabitants or more. The principal 

 cities in the state are Jackson, the capital ; Me- 

 ridian, Vicksburg, Natchez, Hattiesburg, Green- 

 ville, Columbus, Biloxi, Laurel, Yazoo, Gulf- 

 port, McComb, Greenwood, Brookhaven and 

 Corinth. The most important of these are de- 

 scribed under their titles in these volumes. 



Their Religion. Over half of the people of 

 the state are Baptists, and about thirty per cent 

 are Methodists. The remainder are mainly 

 Roman Catholics, Presbyterians, Disciples of 

 Christ and Protestant Episcopalians. 



Education. On account of its scattered and 

 rural population, and of its great number of 

 negroes, educational conditions in Mississippi 

 were not satisfactory until recently. Since 1910 

 a series of measures have been introduced 

 which are bringing good results. These include 

 the establishment of agricultural high schools, 

 the creation of a textbook commission, the es- 

 tablishment of a normal school for the training 

 of teachers and the nomination of a supervisor 

 of elementary rural schools. The schools are 

 maintained from a permanent school fund, 

 which is supplemented by local taxation and 

 by a poll tax of $2 a year from each registered 



