In celebration of Women’s History Month, the University of Mississippi’s Center for Inclusion and Cross Cultural Engagement and the Center for Community Engagement partnered with Rhondalyn Peairs of Historich to offer the Hill Country Herstories: Rebel Belles of L.O.U. tour from Friday, March 22 to Sunday, March 24. The two-hour walking and riding tour allowed participants to learn more about the women who contributed to Oxford’s history.
Historich, founded by UM alum Peairs, is a heritage tourism and educational services company. The company’s mission is to connect people with the complex history of Mississippi. The company has collaborated with UM since 2018, most recently for the 60th anniversary of the university’s integration.
Peairs created Historich to help Mississippians better understand their state’s history.
“I think I’ve always wanted to know how the world works, and for me, natural sciences and social sciences provide the answers for that,” Peairs said. “Mississippi is a place that I love dearly, but it’s also a place that’s often misunderstood even by its own residents because we are very ahistorical, and it seems, now, we’ve become more and more anti-intellectual.”
Peairs explained that the tours she offers and the stories she tells are the answer to Mississippians understanding the past.
“There are going to be things we will never know. We weren’t there, there’s nothing left behind. But telling the history fully and covering the history that we can find is important,” Peairs said. “I think you can see that motivation in the stories I talk about.”
Aileen Lambert, coordinator of LGBTQIA+ programs for CICCE, connected with Peairs to create a program specifically for Women’s History Month. She explained that this tour intended to illuminate the history of Oxford and UM for students.
“I think that it’s really important to know where you are and to know what’s around you,” Lambert said. “It’s really easy, especially when you live in a transient place, it’s really easy to come into a place and not have that kind of historical grounding or orientation.”
Over the weekend, she ran logistics for the history tour.
“We know that Mississippi’s got a really robust, complex history. We know that the university has a really robust and complex history,” Lambert said. “I think the more that we can connect what this place looks and feels like today to what it looked and felt like to people before us is one of the best ways for us to build a sense of empathy and community on campus.”
Featuring nine locations, the tour began at the “Here in Spirit” mural by Anna P. Murphy, located on the back wall of Oxford Square North Plaza. Peairs told the story of Princess Hoka, the Chickasaw woman who owned the land now known as Oxford. Peairs also spoke of Betsey Love Allen, whose lawsuit against an attorney for attempting to take one of the people her children enslaved away, established the first coverture rights in the state of Mississippi.
At Isom Place, the next location on the tour, Peairs discussed Sarah McGehee Isom. Isom was the first female faculty member at UM.
The tour’s next historical spot featured Rebecca Pegues. She and her husband encouraged their enslaved people to read and write, which was highly unusual for slaveowners to do. Pegues kept a diary, now housed in the Department of Archives and Special Collections in the J.D. Williams Library.
Some of the other locations on the tour included the Burns Belfry Museum and the University Museum.
Peairs also led her group of tour participants on campus to the Barnard Observatory. She recounted the story of Jane, an enslaved woman owned by Chancellor Frederick Barnard during the late 19th century. Jane, beaten and sexually assaulted by a UM student, has her story memorialized on the bottom of the contextualization plaque outside of the observatory.
Alyssa Moncrief and Meghan Chitty are second-year law students at the University of Mississippi Law Center. The two students attended the Public Interest Law Foundation auction at the law school, where they placed the highest bid to win a ticket to attend the women’s history tour.
“I’ve lived in Oxford for almost seven years, but have never had the opportunity to learn about the roles that women played in the history and growth of Oxford and Ole Miss, so this opportunity was one I didn’t want to miss,” Moncrief said.
Moncrief explained that she enjoyed learning about important women were in creating the town around her.
“I learned so much rich history about the women who sometimes may be considered ‘in the background,’ but in actuality, played a major role in creating our town and university,” Moncrief said. “Even the women who raised children or served as nurses or teachers were extremely influential in the decisions that led to Oxford as it is today.”
Chitty also found the tour to be insightful and fun, and she aspires to participate in another tour with Historich. She said the Burns-Belfry Museum and the ‘Here in Spirit’ mural were her favorite places on the tour.
“The museum honored so many different people. I feel like I got to learn a lot in a short amount of time,” Chitty said. “I loved the publications that highlighted special events in Oxford during each month. The mural was one of my favorites, (I enjoyed) learning about how Native American culture has shaped women’s rights today. I’ve walked by it a million times and didn’t know the history of it until today. It’s so detailed and beautiful.”
Peairs believes that narratives from Mississippi’s dark past gives us lessons for how we live our lives now.
“I find that even in discussing difficult things or equality about women or social class, the Indigenous, or people of color, that there’s always something that it can teach us. There’s always something that tugs at our heartstrings,” Peairs said. “There’s always something that’s funny, not because the history is pretty, but because of the way people overcame, because of the way they dealt with their lives.”
