SARATOGA

Small But Busy Town

Lasted A Short Time

Gulf & Ship Island RR History from Biloxi Herald

Gulf & Ship Island Locomotives

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Saratoga: A logging Town

BY MIRIAM MAY

Sunday Feature Writer, The Clarion-Ledger, June 8, 1975

Saratoga materialized on the edge of Sullivan's Hollow.

Some say that's why the little Simpson County sawmill town never amounted to much.

That's what D. B. Gore thinks, anyway.

Gore, 89 come August, went to Saratoga from Webster County sometime right after the turn of the century, give or take a few years, to work, because "back then we had to do everything we could to get by."

The Webster County native, a one-time representative who's been “retired” from farming and living in Jackson since 1964, was drawn to Saratoga, he says, by his brother, who kept books for the Seminole Lumber Company. It was located, as was everything else, right beside the railroad (The Gulf and Ship Island) tracks.

What was there. Gore recollects was a large two-story building which contained a freight and telegraph of­fice, a commissary, a bottling plant on the back, and a cafe or restaurant. The top was a hotel or “rooming house," and a barbershop.

Somebody named Freeman kept a post office, says Gore, there was a doctor named Fuller, a ticket agent named Austin, and a Mr. Yelverton was the grocer.

He doesn't recall when it happened, because he had already left there, but Gore says he remembers when he heard, some years later, that “the whole thing had burned up." All ex­cept, of course, some few houses in the area.

The octogenarian, who hasn't been back to the Saratoga community since the day he left, says the only way you could get in then was by rail or on a logging mad that "went down to Mt. Olive.

The Gulf and Ship Island ran what folks in those parts still refer to as a “short dog” from Mendenhall to Saratoga.

Gore remembers clearly that canned tripe was the main dish served at the cafe, that "everything" was going on in “Sullivan's Hollow”, and that once, during a September gale he worked at the mill in water up to his knees.

"Sullivan's Hollow was rough,” he hasn't forgotten. "Every few days they'd have a shootin’.”

Then there's the tale, Gore says, that's told about the fence somebody put up one night across the rails that read, “the first s.o.b. that tears down this fence will never touch another one." Gore reckons the members of the Sullivan family had free passes to ride the train after that "for generations to come."

"If you didn't go into the Hollow in­ about something or somebody," Gore thinks back, "they'd treat you nice. But if you went looking, you were likely to be treated not an nice."

The bottling plant that was located on the back of the main Saratoga building, Gore says, "would give you plenty of drinks, but you'd have to put them on ice yourself,"

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