When Chad Houston was a boy and he’d stay with his grandmother in Amory, they’d often go window shopping – at midnight.
Featured
In a typical Mississippi small town, in downtown Water Valley, there stands a building that’s two stories high. Nobody’s quite sure how old it is, but they know it dates back at least 130 years. Across its lifetime, the structure has served different purposes. It once housed the town’s utility company. It’s been a drugstore and, as local lore goes, it may have even been a mortuary during the Civil War.
Courtney and Thomas Smith met while they were both attending Mississippi College, and married right after graduation. Once Courtney finished nursing school, and Thomas completed med school and his residency in Jackson, they moved to Madison for a stint until Thomas took a job in Oxford as an ER physician.
Montgomery is an analyst by day and a fiction writer by night; and, admittedly, she said this can sometimes make her imagination wander.
While rediscovering Mississippi ourselves, we learned a lot of these towns have small historical museums and attractions, and we sprinkled in a few coffee and book shops for fun, too. We also reached out to neighboring cities — Jackson, Birmingham and Memphis — to highlight day trip options there, too.
After a career in the retail industry, Erin Wolff left New York because of the ever-often burnout.
“(I) knew that I wanted to start my own business, but was kind of disenchanted with the retail world and the never-ending cycle of selling things,” she said. “I knew that (in) my entrepreneurial venture, I’d want to do something that is experience-based and not in the economy of things.”
She and her husband decided to take a cross-country trip before circling back to Nashville; her husband’s family is from Franklin and Murfreesboro, Tennessee, so they’d spent time there. Along their travels, Wolff gained clarity on her vision.