This week will be the last time you’ll be able to add important places to our preliminary list of 101 Mississippi Places to See Before You Die. I think I’ve kept up with the previous suggestions on our Master List page, and this will be the list we start to winnow down beginning next week, after we’ve all settled back down to business from our Christmas and New Year’s festivities. Read over the list and if you have an idea for a place not already there, go to our interactive post and add your place to the comment string.
By next week, I’ll have tallied the total yay and nay votes for each place and we’ll have a good picture of which properties automatically go on the list and those that we need to vote on more formally through a real online poll like we did for our favorite architectural style. For instance, I think the Old Capitol, New Capitol, and Longwood will be “for sure” on the list without any further polling, but sites that are less known statewide will go back for a second round of polling so we can weed ourselves down to our goal of 101 Places.
Once we reach that goal, we’ll post the list as a page that can be accessed 24/7, but I’d also like to gradually add photographs and a brief description for each place. Wouldn’t that make a great group project for the MissPres universe in the coming year?
Categories: Historic Preservation
Preservation in Mississippi 
I’m at a loss how to vote? I’ve done some off-and-on “liking” of comments that have buildings I think deserving, but it feels random.
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Yes, the “voting” is admittedly random at this point, but I don’t see any other way other than the “thumbs up/thumbs down” system with such a large list. Once we close the preliminary list and have a workable number per region (i.e., Natchez, Delta, etc.), we can then do the real polls to narrow down each region. At least that’s the best idea I’ve got after doing a little research into different online polling systems that are currently available. The problem was that no poll I could find allowed users to add items to the list and then have them voted on. The poll on architectural styles we did earlier this year just lumped them all together as “Other” which wasn’t helpful.
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One other quick clarification: Is this the list we would give our architect/historian/preservationist friends or the one we give our friends with no connection to this world? I think they might be two different lists, since we seem to be focusing on architectural significance or integrity in the posts so far.
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Well . . . I think it should include both, although you may be right that currently it is heavy on the architectural significance, and light on historical/cultural significance. I think that shows an existing imbalance in the wider preservation world toward architecturally impressive buildings, but on the other hand, in my experience, those are the buildings that the general public wants to see. Just imho.
What buildings/places would you add to the existing preliminary list that would help resolve the imbalance so far?
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I think we should add photographs and descriptions before/during the vote. Not all of the buildings nominated have widely accessible photographs and histories. If photographs and descriptions are placed on the list before the final votes are cast, that will aid people in making their votes. For example, we all know what Mount Holly looks like, since it has been posted about and commented on so frequently on this site. However, how many people know what West Point School, Patterson Engineering Laboritories, Morgan Apartment Building, or many of the other structures nominated look like.
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I agree we need to provide more info about each suggested place. I’ve started adding links to images that are available either in previous MissPres posts or on other websites and will try to at least find or take an image of each before we start voting (volunteers on this score are welcome). I honestly don’t have the time to do full descriptions of each suggested site. I could take any descriptions that were submitted with each suggestion and just paste them in, but those are few.
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