By David A. Farrell, Item Staff Writer
The Picayune Item
PICAYUNE —
Don Wicks, formerly head of the Pearl River County Historical Society, like many others who discover the historical character Eliza Jane Poitevent, is entranced and mesmerized by a charisma that the petite newspaper publisher still exudes, even 150 years after her death.
Wicks was the author of the multi-part series that just ran in the Picayune Item’s Sunday edition.
Eliza Jane is Picayune’s most famous and illustrious native, having been reared at the Hermitage ante-bellum plantation on the banks of Hobolochitto Creek, from about 1850 to shortly after the Civil War. She bloomed into a writer and poet, as she roamed through the virgin forests and steams that surrounded the Hermitage then in the mid-1800s in what would one-day become the city of Picayune.
Then she went to New Orleans to enter the tough profession of working as a writer on a daily newspaper, “The Daily Picayune,” which she later acquired and later developed into a large metropolitan daily, today the “Times-Picayune.”
She was the first woman to ever publish a large metropolitan daily, and paved the way for women in the future to enter their own chosen careers. Women then could not vote and were expected to stay home.
Wicks has researched her life for about six years. He is a native of Uptown New Orleans and now lives in Picayune. He is a writer and poet.
Wicks first got interested in Eliza Jane when he put out an anthology of local writers. He was looking for a cover and discovered Eliza Jane, once the Poet Laureate of the South, writing under the nom de plume of Pearl Rivers.
When he began looking he found information at Delta State, and various museums and collections in New Orleans. In one collection in New Orleans, he found about 50 love letters between little Eliza Jane and William Cole Harrison, who fell in love with her when she attended the Amite Female Academy in Liberty, Miss. “Harrison fell in love with her and loved her the rest of his life until he died; but circumstances prevented them from marrying,” said Wicks.
“The more I researched her, the more fascinated I became,” he added.
“Just the multiplicity of her character fascinates me,” said Wicks. “It’s hard to define her. She was unique. She was very petite, and frail looking, and small, to wield so much power as a woman.”
He added, “And I think it was because she was so small and people looked on her like a child, but they listened to what she said and they did what she said. She had a commanding presence, and some said she was psychic. She probably used those advantages and talents to do all the things she did with the newspaper.”
The “Daily Picayune” later became the “Times-Picayune” and her family, the Nicholsons, owned it up until 1962 when they sold it to the Newhouse chain. She died in 1895, just days after her husband, George Nicholson, the paper’s business manager, died. They both died from the influenza.
“Actually, her life would make a great movie, and several people have mentioned this to me also. I was hoping to contact Brad Pitt and see if he would be interested in the subject, but he is very difficult to make contact with. Somebody needs to do a movie on her life. It is that dramatic and interesting,” he said. Pitt has chosen to settle in New Orleans and is active in many projects in the city.
Wicks said that Eliza Jane revolutionized the newspaper business and created what was the first society section in her newspaper, directed toward the needs and interests of women and their families. She called it the Society Bee. She began the section with the idea that a little bee came each morning and alighted on her desk and told her about all the society gossip and happenings going on in the city.
The paper, which was emerging out of bankruptcy, skyrocketed in circulation. She had fashion articles from New York and Paris, she began running serial novels (she wrote one herself), she was innovative installing the first lights and telephones in her newspaper, she promoted jetties over dredging the Mississippi River, which is still done, and invented the Weather Frog, which for decades was used in presenting the weather report in her paper and once inspired a Mardi Gras float.
Wicks also points out she was instrumental in promoting the construction of the New Orleans and Northeastern railway through the piney woods, which was completed in 1882 and ran through Picayune, and was the first impetus in the economic growth of southwestern Mississippi.
For her backing of the railroad, the railroad barons gave her the honor of naming the first two stops in Mississippi and she named Nicholson after her husband and Picayune after the newspaper. Prior to that the site of the ante-bellum Kimball plantation was known as Hobolochitto, after the creek.
Eliza always referred to her ancestral home as “that old place in the piney woods with the big Indian name,” said Wicks.
“How she found time to do all she did, is beyond my understanding,” said Wicks.
Wicks says he is trying to produce a book on Eliza Jane, but says, ”I still have a lot of research to do on it; the first chapter will be the hardest.”
Wicks worked for several federal government agencies before retiring. He now writes novels, poetry and historical pieces and is active in various civic projects throughout Picayune.
“Eliza was a powerful and descriptive writer. Her descriptions of nature in her prose and poetry reveals an observational power that equals any world-class scientist,” said Wicks.
