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I was at Wild Bills cabin which was originally Pappy Tom's. Pappy Tom is my ggg grandfather paternally...along with probably 1500 other descendents now...lol....one of his daughters....Wild Bill's half sister...married my gg grandfather....all those wild old dogs had 4 or 5 wives who eventually died in childbirth after 6-8 children....ruff life.

Anyhow...back to the cabin which used to be one of the oldest continually lived in dwellings (true dogtrot with the kitchen separate) and I believe originated around 1815...anyhow....damned old for Miss.

I went there with my maternal grandma (also part Sullivan) to see Wild Bill's nephew(?) Shep and his Wife (?) around 1980 on a watermelon expedition. She whipped up some fried peach pies and we drank spring water from their well and visited till late. I think they may have had power by then. It was definitely in a hollow by Miss standards....but nothing like the Tennessee version in which I'm sitting in and typing right now past by nite-nite between Shy's Hill and Laurel Ridge.

You should research the famous basketball game shootout between Mize and Mcgee in the late 1910s early 1920s....a number of casualties and my paternal grandpa as a boy was in a tree watching the whole thing. I believe it was on an outside clay court...all over a bad call..lol..and of course the Sullivans figure largely in it...small wonder

My maternal grandma remarried Wild Bill's youngest boy Boyd Sullivan in the late 60s. Boyd had been with Pershing in Mexico and France. He rushed home early in the service when Wild Bill was on his deathbed and barely got there as Wild Bill expired. I have the letter from the fellow who drove him from the train station in Mcgee to Boyd later talking about how the fellow was glad he grabbed Boyd off the train in Mcgee instead of waiting till Mt Olive or Boyd would not have made it in time.

A number of books on Wild Bill by the Ole Miss press. I have the Blue covered one. I believe Bill killed nearly 30 men in his lifetime usually hand to hand but none that as he said...didn't deserve it..lol

He would have made a good Nathan Forrest but I believe he and a few of his brothers mostly waited out the war in the leaf river swamps and the Free State of Jones....some did join the butternuts though to be fair.

My grandfather was raised in Sullivan's hollow but as far as I know now, wasn't Sullivan. Other family names are Dickerson, Coleman, Craft, Goldman, Lee, Fortenberry. There are some Sullivan's in there by marriage I heard from a distant cousin in Magee once but haven't had time for more extensive gen research. Remember briefly about the basketball game shootout in the only Sullivan book I have---the one by Chester Sullivan--mine'a a softcover version. My aunt has an old copy of a book called Confederate Patriots of Jones county that I have borrowed in the past--interesting reading about Newt Knight and his followers there as well as in the Chester Sullivan book. One of my distant relatives,(a 2nd or 3rd great aunt by marriage to a Dickerson uncle) was named Cornealous Coleman, used to swim the Leaf River on horseback to carry food to her two brothers and others who were with Newt Knight there in those Leaf river swamps--so it says in this book. The last time I visited Miss we left Mt. Olive on a back road that ended right near Hot Coffee and took us over a bridge over the Leaf River. I remember thinking of the Coleman woman that day and wondering if we weren't traveling along the same ground. That's what visiting Miss has done to me at times, along with haunting graveyards, tranformed by genealogical pursuits into a contemporary ghost of those long dead. I have mostly curbed those pursuits, interesting and enjoyable but time consuming.

Maybe I'll get to visit again and go see that old Sullivan dogtrot. My grandfather lived in one somewhere outside Waynesboro back in the fifties, we stayed with him there when we first moved to Miss--I remember sleeping on the breezeway porch on an old creaky bed.

I appreciate the sharing of your Sullivan history. Now, I'll probably run a mild case of gen fever for a few days and re read the Chester Sullivan book and my bad copy of my aunt's book, lol.