James L. Cummins
A History of Conservation by James L. Cummins
As America celebrates its 250th birthday, I find myself drawn to the land near Winona, Mississippi, where my family's farm sits on the original Herring Homestead. This ground connects our nation's founding ideals directly to my own roots, and the story behind it is one of faith, sacrifice, and the westward push that shaped Mississippi itself. The Herring family (my mother’s family) traces back to Wales in the 1500s.
Julines Palmer, the maternal grandfather of Reverend Julines Herring, was born in 1533 in Coventry, England. Educated at Oxford, he embraced the doctrines of the Reformation and paid for that conviction with his life, burned at the stake on July 15, 1556, near Newbury, England. His daughter Joanne married John Herring, and their son became the Reverend Julines Herring, a celebrated preacher in Wales and Holland who eventually fled to Amsterdam in 1636 to escape continued religious persecution.
The church in Amsterdam financed the voyage of Julines' son, John, and his wife to America. The journey was deliberately complicated. Believing British authorities were tracking him, John appears under different names on multiple ship manifests in 1635, in what is believed to have been a deliberate effort to conceal his escape. John Herring settled near Jamestown, Virginia and farmed tobacco by the James River. Four generations later, William Giles Herring and his kinsman Richard Herring were forging arms for the Continental Army in North Carolina with a contract to produce muskets and bayonets under the name of Herring and DeVane.
They were patriots who helped secure the very freedoms their ancestors had crossed an ocean to find. William's son Wright married and moved west, and by 1833 five Herring brothers had arrived in the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek lands that would soon become Carroll County, Mississippi. On December 25, 1833, the Governor of Mississippi signed a bill establishing Carroll County, with Absalom Herring being appointed to form the new county's government. His brother William Giles Herring, Jr., served as circuit clerk and designed the Carroll County jail. Absalom's nephew Ichabod began acquiring land on the homestead in the fall of 1833 and built a 2-story log home, complete with a spiral staircase. His son and my great grandfather Stonewall Jackson Herring began constructing the current home around 1891 and completed it in 1902.
By 1936, Progressive Farmer had recognized it as one of the four most beautiful homes in the Mississippi Valley. I now own this home, the twelve outbuildings around it, including the Herring School, the blacksmith shop, the buggy shed, as well as the Herring Family Cemetery, and much of the original farm. This America's 250th birthday, I look out across that land and think about what it truly means to steward a place across generations. Conservation, at its deepest level, is exactly that
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