7 Porch-Sitting Habits That Give Away a Mississippi Upbringing

More than 600 cabins stand on the Neshoba County Fair’s grounds, and almost every one of them has a broad front porch built for long afternoons.

The fair has run nearly every summer since 1891.

A Mississippi porch has never been decoration, and the habits that fill it don’t get explained to anybody who didn’t grow up there.

These are the porch-sitting habits that give away a Mississippi upbringing.

The Cold Coke for Company

Vicksburg, Mississippi became the first place anywhere to bottle Coca-Cola, back in 1894.

Joseph Biedenharn ran the operation out of a shop on Washington Street.

Once the bottles worked, he loaded a horse and buggy and sold cases to rural Mississippi towns himself.

That bottled-drink habit never left the porch.

A Mississippi porch still runs on a cooler kept full for whoever stops by, opened before anyone has to ask for a drink.

Warm was never allowed.

Porch Pickin’

A guitar or harmonica rarely leaves a Mississippi porch for long, no matter the season.

Hill country blues grew up on that habit long before it ever reached a recording studio.

Holly Springs runs a summer concert series called Blues on the Porch.

Musicians perform right from the porches of old houses instead of a stage.

Neighbors carry lawn chairs and sit in the yard to listen.

Mississippi Blues Trail markers call the state the birthplace of America’s music, and that claim got built one porch at a time.

No stage required.

The Neshoba County Fair Porch

Mississippi’s Neshoba County Fair has run nearly every summer since 1891, with a single break for World War II.

More than 600 cabins stand on the fairgrounds, and the Mississippi Encyclopedia notes that almost all of them carry broad front porches built for long afternoons and evenings of visiting.

Families hold the same cabin for generations, and they decorate the porch with a name board, a flag, or a college banner.

Fair week runs in late July, and most cabins show some sign of life on the porch at any hour, day or night.

The porch is where the week happens.

The cabin outlasts everybody.

Reading the Sky From the Porch

Mississippi still remembers April 5, 1936, the day an F5 tornado tore through Tupelo and killed more than two hundred people.

The Tupelo tornado still ranks as the fourth-deadliest tornado in U.S. history.

That kind of history is why Mississippians still watch the sky from the porch the moment it turns green or the wind goes still.

Mississippi sits inside what meteorologists call Dixie Alley, a tornado corridor that also runs through Arkansas, Louisiana, Alabama, and Tennessee.

Unlike tornado activity on the Plains, the risk in Mississippi runs through the cool season instead of stopping when summer ends.

Cool-season tornadoes, the kind that hit between November and February, are part of why Mississippi’s tornado season never closes.

Watching from the porch never stops.

No warning needed.

Sunday Porch Visiting

Gallup has ranked Mississippi the country’s most religious state nine years running the last time it checked.

That number barely moves from one survey to the next.

Growing up going to church in Mississippi usually meant a second stop after the sermon, straight to the porch, still dressed, waiting on whoever showed up next.

That’s where the sermon got a second round of discussion, passed around along with a glass of tea.

Sunday dinner came after that, and the porch usually outlasted the meal by a couple of hours.

Some families skip the table altogether and eat straight off plates balanced on the porch rail.

Nobody minds.

Barq’s in the Porch Cooler

Biloxi, Mississippi bottled the first Barq’s root beer in 1898, and the brand stayed a coastal secret for years before it sold anywhere else.

Edward Barq, a trained chemist, built the drink from the same artesian water Biloxi bottled for drinking.

The company moved up to a bigger, twelve-ounce bottle by the 1930s.

That home-grown soda still shows up in a Mississippi porch cooler more than most, right alongside the ice and the sweet tea.

Grabbing a Barq’s ice-cold before supper is as routine as the porch light coming on.

The crate never stayed empty.

The Breezeway as Living Room

Mississippi’s early farmhouses often started as a single log cabin, then grew into two cabins joined by an open breezeway, a style the state’s archives call a dog trot.

That open passage had no doors on either end, so air moved straight through the house.

Families shelled beans, plucked chickens, and ate supper in that open breezeway more often than they used the front room.

The parlor stayed closed up for company, swept and dusted and mostly empty.

The porch, not the parlor, is where the day happened.

The rest followed.

In many Mississippi homes, the porch still pulls that same duty.

How Far a Mississippi Soda Traveled

Barq’s stayed close to home for decades after that first bottle in Biloxi.

By 1937, the company had grown to 62 bottling plants spread across 22 states, still built on the same root beer recipe Edward Barq worked out on the coast.

The Koerner and Oudt families bought the company in 1976 and moved its headquarters to New Orleans, a couple hours down the coast from where it started.

Mississippi kept the name.