The Mystery of Hattiesburg's Footprints, Solved
The untold history of the Mississippi freedman John Wesley Fairley
For as long as anyone can remember, a series of nine footprints encased in brass have been embedded along a busy stretch of sidewalk in downtown Hattiesburg, Mississippi.
They have been there so long locals sometimes use them as directional markers. “At the intersection by the footprints,” someone might say, instead of, “At the corner of Main and Front streets.” The local Post Office once received a piece of stamped mail addressed to, “the store across the street from the store with the brass feet,” and the mail carrier knew where to make the delivery—Owl Drug Store. Such is their prominence along the cityscape that in the early 1980s, when downtown sidewalks were being replaced, the crew tasked with removing the old walkways preserved the footprints on direct orders from the mayor, Bobby Chain, who remembered playing on them as a child in the 1930s. Chain was not alone in having sentimental childhood memories of the prints, and when the new sidewalk was revealed, there they were, in the same place they had always been. The Hattiesburg (Miss.) American newspaper praised the preservation effort:“City fathers and work crews easily could have ripped right through the brass feet with their jackhammers, mortar mixers, and pebbly sidewalks,” an editorial from the time read. “But they didn’t. The jackhammer carefully traced the outline of the footprints, workmen carefully lifted them out, and they were neatly replaced in the new walkway ... As time marches forward, it at least leaves its footprints in downtown Hattiesburg.”
It was around that time, during the summer of 1983, that the people of Hattiesburg realized that no one among them actually knew the history of these footprints. No one knew how they had come to be there, how long they had been there, whose feet had made them, or when they had been encased in brass. In a piece headlined, “Footprints mystery not solved yet,” the Hattiesburg (Miss.) American bandied about several possible origin stories, but nothing definitive was ever established. So, the people of Hattiesburg moved on, doing what they had always done: Walking over a series of downtown footprints with an unknown history.
Today, nearly forty years later, some questions remain, but the most important has been answered. Thanks to the inquiries of local historians, we now know that the footprints were made by the Mississippi freedman John Wesley Fairley, whose extraordinary life story has, until now, gone largely untold.
Hattiesburg-area historian Lisa Foster aims to change that, starting with her current efforts to have a historical marker bearing Fairley’s name placed downtown near the intersection of Front and Main streets. While that will ensure that every passerby knows whose footprints adorn the sidewalk, for Foster, the need for a marker runs much deeper.
“Fairley’s history,” she said, “is the history of Hattiesburg.”
Who was John Wesley Fairley?
John Wesley Fairley was born enslaved by a man named Peter Fairley in Perry County, Mississippi, fifty or so miles north from the Gulf Coast, in 1840. When the Civil War began, “Wes” Fairley, as he was known, went off and joined the Union Army, serving with the 74th Regiment United States Colored Troops. He was stationed on Ship Island, just off the Mississippi coastline, assigned to oversee Confederate prisoners of war.
According to legend, Fairley recognized one of the prisoners from before the war, a white man from South Mississippi named Lorenzo Nollie Dantzler. Fairley liked Dantzler and began sneaking him extra rations. For this, Dantzler always credited Fairley with saving his life, and, after acquiring a coastal sawmill in the 1870s, he hired Fairley to float logs down Black Creek.
Fairley excelled at the job: Legend has it that he was a powerful man who weighed roughly 225 pounds and—depending on who you ask—stood either seven feet tall or almost seven feet tall. Fairley made his home in Stone County, near the Gulf Coast, and one historian dubbed him “The Paul Bunyan of Stone County.”
As the nineteenth century wore on, Fairley, because of his abilities as a “creek runner,” prospered, purchasing property across South Mississippi. He also built an inn near his home on the road between Hattiesburg and Gulfport, where travelers could lodge and rest their horses. In 1900, probably because of old age, Fairley stopped floating logs down Black Creek for Dantzler Lumber Company. He died in 1918, at the age of seventy-eight. He had married twice—one of his wives was a maid who worked for Dantzler—and had seven children, one of whom he named Dantzler. He is buried in a family cemetery in Stone County.
“There is a great deal of discussion upon the streets as to the size shoe the brazen giant who entered the Carter building would require…” —From the October 24, 1907 edition of the Hattiesburg Daily News
In the late 1930s, the Federal Writers’ Project began collecting narratives from former slaves who were still living. Fairley had been dead for roughly twenty years by then, but a white man named B.H. Breland wrote a brief history of his life to be included in the project because, as he said, “he is entitled to at least this small tribute to his memory.”
“(He) enjoyed the respect and goodwill of the white people and the respect and fear of the colored,” the narrative states.
It was a Mississippi historian named Charles Sullivan who stumbled across the fact that Fairley’s footprints are on the Hattiesburg sidewalk. In 1984, Sullivan was conducting an oral history interview with Nollie Hickman, a seventy-two-year-old South Mississippi native who taught at the University of Louisiana-Monroe during the middle of the twentieth century. Hickman, who died in 1987, was the dean of Mississippi timber industry historians and both his father and grandfather, like Wes Fairley, were creek runners for the Dantzler Lumber Company. In fact, Hickman was named after Lorenzo Nollie Dantzler. Knowing this connection, Sullivan asked him about Fairley.
After sharing some of Fairley’s story, Hickman said: “You can see his footsteps up on the streets of Hattiesburg ... they are in concrete.”
Sullivan asked why they were there.
“I’m not sure why they did it,” Hickman said. “I have been told all my life that they took the pattern for those steps from his feet.”
The fact that the footprints in the sidewalk are huge—roughly fourteen inches long—aligns with another legend: Because of the size of his feet, Fairley could never find shoes that fit him right. There are stories of him walking barefoot into the federal land office in Jackson and buying tracts of land.
After being tipped off by Hickman, Sullivan sought out Lucille Fairley, one of Wes Fairley’s granddaughters. Lucille Fairley said she, too, had been told that her grandfather’s footprints were on a sidewalk in downtown Hattiesburg. Someone in Stone County, she said, told her that her grandfather was walking into a bank at the corner of Front and Main streets when a sidewalk had just been poured, and he walked right across the wet concrete.
“[T]hat’s all I know about this,” Lucille, who died in 1994, said.
There is one problem with her story: There has never been a bank at the corner of Front and Main streets.
Following the Footprints
Sullivan, a professor at Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College, is the one who told Lisa Foster whose footprints were on the Hattiesburg sidewalk. He did so about a decade ago, and since then, Foster has been working on unraveling the rest of the story. She has made progress, too.
The Carter Building stands at the corner of Front and Main streets. It was big news around Hattiesburg when the six-story structure first opened in 1907, when the city was flourishing from the success of the local timber industry.
Foster discovered a story in the October 24, 1907 edition of the Hattiesburg Daily News with the headline, “Giant Footprints Cause Discussion.” The story began: “There is a great deal of discussion upon the streets as to the size shoe the brazen giant who entered the Carter building would require…” Clearly written in jest, the piece goes on to suggest that the “giant” may “have been a cousin to the far-famed Cyclopse.” A follow-up story the next day stated that the “giant” was able to find shoes that fit him at Turner & Co., a local business, as well as a suit that fit him at Davidson & Co., another local store.
“It will be noted that the giant is a reader of the Daily News,” the story ended, “and through advertisements contained therein found where he could secure all that he wanted.”
From these “stories,” which obviously read like advertisements for local businesses, Foster surmises that the footprints were created as a sort of marketing ploy. Supporting this theory is the fact that Foster also found an advertisement in the Hattiesburg Daily News for a business, not far from the Carter Building, that made brass castings. That discovery suggests that Fairley never actually walked across wet concrete but, instead, agreed to have brass castings of his feet made and placed along the sidewalk in front of the new Carter Building.
Remembering Fairley in Hattiesburg
Thanks, in part, to Sullivan’s advocacy, the Mississippi Department of Archives and History placed a historical marker in Stone County honoring John Wesley Fairley in 2018.
One reason Lisa Foster believes a similar marker is warranted in downtown Hattiesburg is because, by relaying Fairley’s story, it will offer a more complete version of South Mississippi history. Only a few blocks from the footprints, Foster noted, a Confederate monument stands on the grounds of the Forrest County Courthouse. A marker honoring Fairley would add the story of the freedman Fairley to Hattiesburg's historical narrative.
It is worth noting that the Confederate monument was unveiled in the fall of 1910. On the day of its dedication, Foster said, a procession of former Confederate soldiers and dignitaries walked through downtown to the courthouse. The path they took would have taken them along the sidewalk at the corner of Front and Main streets where, like people before them and so many people since, they unknowingly passed over the footprints of a South Mississippi freedman.
The Hattiesburg Historic Conservation Commission will have to sign off on any historical marker being erected in downtown Hattiesburg. Foster submitted an application for the marker to the commission in October.