Kenneth Brasell of Batesville and Jim Seay of Chapel Hill, N.C. went to New Albany with the purpose of purchasing doors that the current owners of the land had removed from the hunting camp clubhouse.

"We just wanted to retrieve an important piece of Panola County’s history," Seay said.

Beginning around 1915 and continuing through the mid-1930s, Faulkner was a regular member of the hunting parties that General James Stone held annually at his clubhouse in the Tallahatchie Bottom.

Stone was born in Panola County in 1854, and he established his first law practice in Batesville in 1880. He moved to Oxford in 1892, and it was there that Faulkner became friends with Phil Stone, the General’s son.

Stone had extensive land holdings in Panola County and continued to maintain his hunting camp here.

Faulkner would later draw on his experiences at the Stone hunting camp in writing "The Bear" and other sections of "Go Down, Moses", as well as parts of "Absalom, Absalom!" and "Big Woods".

BATESVILLE – They found much changed after 40 years.

On their way to a June 20 memorial service in Philadelphia honoring the three civil rights workers- Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman- slain near there in 1964, about a dozen former volunteers stopped in Panola County for a small, intimate reunion.

They had been volunteers with the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) who had worked in this county during the "Mississippi Freedom Summer" of 1964 and afterwards. They had helped many local black people take their first, halting steps towards the Panola County Courthouse in Batesville to register to vote.

Saturday at Macedonia Community Center west of Batesville, they were reunited with former hosts and friends from those tense times, including Lygunnah Bean, South Panola School District Board of Trustees President and County Road Manager. "I was six years old that summer," Bean said.

He had learned much about the setting of that summer by reading files of the now-defunct Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, he said, but "I remember the people had to guard their houses" from attacks by nightriders.

"We met at the public library. I say that for our young people, we met at the public library," Bean said of the reunion planning committee, repeating to emphasize that the meeting location would not have been an option in 1964.
Panola County NAACP chapter president Julius Harris named the black people elected to public office since the summer of 1964, starting with Robert Avant, elected supervisor in 1987, the first African-American to serve in that county capacity since Reconstruction. Harris’s recognition included other people elected as supervisors, trustees of the North and South Panola school districts, election commissioners, members of the Panola Democratic Executive Committee, city officials in Batesville, Sardis, Crenshaw, Como, state representatives, and those appointed as poll workers. Among them

Cheryl James, recently elected to a four-year term as chair of the County Democratic Executive Committee. She also said that she had learned much about the atmosphere of racism and tension of the 1960’s from reading the files of the now-defunct Sovereignty Commission.

Chris Williams was 18 and just out of high school when he was among a group of 10 volunteers let out at the bus stop in Batesville about 5 a.m. on a Sunday morning. They had spent two weeks on a college campus in Oxford, Ohio, undergoing training and orientation for what they might expect to find in Mississippi. There was no one to meet their chartered bus when they arrived at the Batesville bus stop.