L. Clinton Kirkland Papers

Luther Clinton Kirkland was born on November 19, 1894, on a farm in Jones County, Mississippi, the youngest of ten children born to Elijah Thomas and Samantha Ardella Tucker Kirkland. His parents were successful farmers who raised cotton, sugar cane, vegetable crops, and livestock, and rented out portions of their acreage to tenants and sharecroppers. The Kirklands were Universalists, and Clinton Kirkland received his secondary education at the Southern Industrial Institute, a school in Camp Hill, Alabama, operated by Dr. Lyman Ward, a Universalist minister from New York. On the suggestion of Dr. Ward, he followed his older brother, J. Brackin Kirkland (also a graduate of the Southern Industrial Institute), to Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. He entered Cornell in 1915 and graduated with a degree in agriculture in 1921. He held various jobs around campus to finance his college education, including service as chauffeur and houseboy in the home of former Cornell president Andrew D. White, succeeding his brother in that post. He also rowed on the Cornell crew. Kirkland's schooling at Cornell was interrupted by military service with the 7th U.S. Infantry Medical Detachment in France and Germany during World War I.

After graduation from Cornell in 1921 Kirkland worked as an instructor in the University's Farm Practice Department for three years. On April 12, 1923, he married Esther Elizabeth "Betty" Brewster, whose cousin had married his brother Brackin two years before. In 1924 Clinton and Betty moved to Adams, New York, where he worked as the foreman of a large dairy and sheep farm. They stayed in New York until the fall of 1926,when they moved south to Mississippi. They purchased some land owned by the Kirkland family and there developed a farm that would be their home for more than fifty years. It was located in Jones County, near the town of Moselle, not far from his childhood home. They adopted two children, a two-year old boy, Bob Britt, in 1929, and a newborn girl, Eleanor Jo, in 1931.

The raising of Aberdeen Angus beef cattle was the major enterprise of the Kirkland farm, but during the Depression Clinton Kirkland sought salaried employment. In 1933 he became a part-time appraiser for the Federal Land Bank of New Orleans. He continued with the Federal Land Bank, sometimes on a full-time basis, until 1951, when he retired to devote full time to farming once again. At this same time they became foster parents of a neighbor boy, Billy Cox, and raised him to maturity.

In 1950 the Kirklands were joined in Mississippi by Clinton's brother and his wife, J. Brackin and Eleanor George Kirkland (Betty's cousin). J. Brackin Kirkland had retired from a career in education and youth work and purchased some of Clinton's land on which to develop a farm. The brothers farmed together for about a decade until both gradually reduced their operations and sold off most of their land. Clinton Kirkland died on January 27, 1979.

Elijah Thomas Kirkland (L. Clinton Kirkland's father) was born in 1854 in Henry County, Alabama. His father, Moses Kirkland, was killed during the Civil War while in Confederate service. Shortly after the war his mother took the family to Mississippi to live with her father, Sherrod Sholar. He had relocated to Mississippi several years before and established a homestead on Tallahala Creek in southestern Jones County. Elijah Thomas Kirkland grew up on his grandfather's farm and in 1878 married a Jones County native, Samantha Ardella Tucker. They established their own farm in southeastern Jones County near the present-day town of Moselle. They had ten children, nine of whom survived to adulthood. Samantha Ardella Tucker Kirkland died in 1933, Elijah Thomas Kirkland in 1937.

Mary Jane Grantham (b. 1851) was the older sister of Elijah Thomas Kirkland. J. Brackin Kirkland (1892-1974) and Charles Hascal Kirkland (1884-1939) were two of his sons, older brothers of L. Clinton Kirkland. Wilson Herrington was a distant cousin of the Kirklands. Martin Van Buren Tucker was the father of Samantha Tucker Kirkland.

Other individuals represented in the collection include Jeff Collins, a lawyer in Laurel, Mississippi, with whom Clinton corresponded during his administration of the E. T. Kirkland estate, and Goode Montgomery, also a Laurel lawyer, who handled financial accounts for E. T. Kirkland.