As JRGordon noted in last week’s News Roundup, the long-abandoned and highly endangered Corinth Machinery Building, built in 1869, suffered a large partial collapse in that weekend’s heavy storms. As you might remember from a post back in January 2010, there was some movement to try to at least stabilize the building, but nothing ever came of it, and as with Cathrine Hall at Mississippi Industrial College and Jackson’s Capitol Street Methodist, once a small structural problem was allowed to remain unrepaired, the building declined faster and faster. The high winds of a few weeks ago were just the straw that broke the camel’s back.
Earlier this week, architect Ben Ledbetter, a Corinth native, sent this photo of the current state of the building, which is barely a shell and obviously not long for this world.
Corinth Machinery Building, photo by Tommy Ledbetter, January 31, 2012
The Corinth Machinery Building was the state’s oldest industrial building. I guess we’ll have to start looking around for what building now holds that title.
RIP Corinth Machinery Building, 1869-2012.
Corinth Machinery Building, Historic American Building Survey (HABS), March 1975
Categories: Corinth, Demolition/Abandonment, Industrial
Preservation in Mississippi 
How very depressing…bad news from all over today it appears.
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so sad….
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What a beautiful building…sad to see it go.
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It is a tragedy to see this building fall apart. It’s an even more terrible tragedy that the people of Mississippi did so little to preserve it. As a native of Corinth and granddaughter of late Ben Ledbetter Sr., a former Corinth Machinery employee, I am tremendously disappointed in the people responsible for letting this magnificent structure rot, unattended and forgotten. For a city that prides itself on HISTORY, this is shameful.
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My only correction to this obituary is that the building WAS a shell. Now it is rubble.
A Mississippi friend just wrote to me that “[I] had lost hope [for the building], as the community just didn’t seem all that interested in it. Just no energy [in Corinth] and [its] history is slipping away. . . . no energy, no imagination, no initiative.”
Rather than act historically, we have all been at home watching The History Channel.
I must add that to blame the current owners (of only two years), as some have, is in a way to shoot the messenger. Best I can tell, they bought the property with a sincere desire to somehow, against all hope (by that time), save this building. We are all to blame, as much as none of us is to blame.
It was a harsh wind that toppled those walls, and it has been blowing for a long time.
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So sad to see such a beautiful building collapse!
Michael C. Craven
Chicago divorce lawyer
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Hi from the future, did this last guy really sign his post with his full name and “Chicago divorce lawyer”?
Is that not the most Chicago divorce lawyer move ever?
Such a shame about the building too.
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