Appalachian Figures
In the summer of 1843, a boy named Benjamin Franklin Burkitt was born just outside Lawrenceburg in Lawrence County, Tennessee. Later generations would know him simply as Frank, the editor in the wool hat from Okolona, Mississippi, who took on railroads, bankers, and the “Bourbon” Democratic establishment on behalf of small farmers.
His story begins decades earlier along the migration corridors that linked the Carolina Piedmont, the Highland Rim of Tennessee, and the cotton frontier further south. Frank’s great grandfather, Lemuel Burkitt, was an English descended Baptist minister and religious writer who settled in North Carolina before the American Revolution. Frank’s grandfather, Burgess or Burges Burkitt, carried the family into Lawrence County, where an executor’s settlement and cemetery records place him among the early white settlers.
Frank’s father, Henry Lemuel Burkitt, trained as a lawyer. Genealogical compilations and county level resource guides show Burkitt and related surnames scattered across Lawrence County Bible records, tombstones, and deed indexes. Dunbar Rowland’s Official and Statistical Register of the State of Mississippi, which prints a biographical sketch of “Frank Burkitt, of Okolona,” fills in a basic outline. It records that Frank was born near Lawrenceburg on 5 July 1843 to Henry Lemuel and Louise Howell Burkitt, and that Henry moved from North Carolina to Tennessee, then fled west into Alabama during the Civil War before finally relocating the family to Mississippi in 1865.
This family arc placed young Frank on the edge of what we now call greater Appalachia. Lawrenceburg lay along the routes that funneled upland Carolinians into Middle Tennessee and then on into Alabama and Mississippi. His later career in the Black Prairie of Chickasaw County would always carry that imprint of upland migration and small farm politics.
“Captain Burkitt” and the making of a country editor
By 1860, census and biographical sources place teenage Frank working as a clerk in nearby Waynesboro, Tennessee, and soon afterward at school in Virginia. When the Civil War broke out he enlisted in Company I of the 9th Tennessee Cavalry, a Confederate unit. Rowland’s Register notes that he rose from sergeant major to captain before his parole in May 1865, which is why later sources sometimes style him “Capt. Frank Burkitt.”
After the war he followed a path common among ambitious young Southern veterans. He taught school in northern Alabama and in Mississippi while privately reading law. In 1872 he passed his examinations and briefly practiced, then stepped into the world that would define him: the county newspaper.
In Houston, Mississippi, he became editor of the Chickasaw Messenger in the early 1870s. A local history of Okolona notes that this weekly paper, established in Houston in 1872, moved to Okolona in 1876 “with Captain Frank Burkitt as the editor.” Chronicling America’s catalog record for The People’s Messenger, the Okolona successor, lists it simply as “Okolona, Miss. : Frank Burkitt” and tags it under Populism and Mississippi newspapers.
Rowland’s Register explains that he moved the Chickasaw Messenger to Okolona and later edited it under the name People’s Messenger, and that the paper eventually passed into new hands and became the Okolona Messenger in 1900. A modern history of the Okolona Messenger stresses how continuous that line has been. Newspapers have appeared in Okolona since 1849; the building that housed Burkitt’s paper around 1900 is now treated as the town’s oldest business establishment.
From the start, Burkitt did not simply print local marriage notices and train schedules. During the violent redemption campaigns of the mid 1870s, he used his editorials to attack the Republican state government and to support Democratic conservatives who aimed to restore white rule. That early record complicates any effort to treat him as a simple folk hero. He began as an ally of the Redeemer Democrats before breaking with them over money, railroads, and schools.
One revealing glimpse into his early political standing shows up in a letter now preserved in the Civil War and Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi Project. In November 1880 Burkitt wrote from Okolona to Governor John M. Stone requesting the honor of physically carrying Mississippi’s electoral vote to Washington City, and politely asking for the governor’s influence. The very fact that he felt entitled to ask speaks volumes about his place inside the Democratic establishment at that moment.
Grangers, Alliancemen, and the gospel of the wool hat
Once Reconstruction ended, Burkitt’s relationship with that establishment began to fray. He joined the Mississippi Grange, one of the farm organizations that tried to check railroad power and middlemen, and emerged as a leading spokesman for small white farmers. He helped lobby for the creation of a state agricultural college and was rewarded with a seat as an original trustee of Mississippi Agricultural and Mechanical College, today Mississippi State University.
The story takes a turn that later made him famous. By the mid 1880s he had become disillusioned with the new college. He argued that it served the sons of wealthy families while draining scarce funds away from common schools. The Mississippi Encyclopedia notes that these arguments formed the heart of a widely circulated pamphlet titled The Wool Hat, in which he glorified small farmers, denounced the elite, and demanded sharp retrenchment of state spending.
The title was not accidental. Across the South, the term “wool hat boys” had become a badge of pride for poorer white yeoman farmers who contrasted their rough caps and everyday clothes with the silk hats of bankers and planters. Historians of Populism have traced the wool hat as a symbol of insurgent rural politics in states like Georgia and South Carolina. Burkitt leaned into that imagery. Accounts from the 1880s describe him touring the countryside in a worn Confederate uniform with a wool hat on his head while lecturing for the Farmers’ Alliance, the successor to the Grange.
Rowland’s Register lists another pamphlet, Our State Finances and School System, published in 1886. Together these tracts, along with hundreds of newspaper columns, made him the loudest critic of what he saw as extravagance in Jackson and favoritism toward corporate interests. In the process he became the best known voice of what he liked to call the wool hat crowd, the tenants and owner farmers who felt squeezed by falling cotton prices, rising debt, and distant railroad and banking powers.
“My right arm shall fall palsied”: the 1890 convention
Burkitt entered the Mississippi House of Representatives as a Democrat in 1886, representing Chickasaw County. He served three terms in the House, from 1886 to 1890 and again from 1892 to 1896, then returned for a final House term from 1908 to 1912. After that he served in the state Senate from 1912 until his death in 1914.
In those same years Mississippi farmers turned increasingly to the Farmers’ Alliance, a mass membership group that tried to use cooperatives and politics to fight railroad rates and credit abuses. Alliance membership climbed rapidly; Burkitt served as a state lecturer and used his paper to spread Alliance ideas, including the controversial “subtreasury” proposal in which the federal government would warehouse crops and issue low interest loans on them.
The Alliance also backed a call for a new state constitution. Burkitt wanted to break what he saw as the over representation of Delta counties dominated by planter elites. He ran and won a seat at the 1890 constitutional convention, where he served on the franchise committee. The Mississippi Encyclopedia credits him with pushing to reapportion seats in favor of hill and white majority counties, but also describes him as one of the few delegates who ultimately voted against the new constitution.
His reasons were revealing. The convention’s franchise provisions aimed squarely at Black voting rights through poll taxes, literacy tests, and so called understanding clauses. Burkitt shared the white supremacist desire to restrict Black political power, but he objected that the final plan would also strip poor whites of the vote. In an impassioned speech recorded in the convention proceedings, he invoked his memory of a poor white comrade from his cavalry unit who would be disfranchised under the proposed system and declared, “My right arm shall fall palsied at my side before I put my signature to such a document.” He voted no, though the constitution passed and became a model for Jim Crow disfranchisement across the South.
The episode captures the limits of his radicalism. Burkitt could defy his own party over class, debt, and apportionment, yet he still operated within a political universe built on racial hierarchy.
Night riders and “the putrid, putrescent, putrifying” Bourbons
The fiercest test of Alliance politics came in the 1891 campaign for the United States Senate. The Alliance backed Ethelbert Barksdale, a former Democratic editor who supported the subtreasury plan, against incumbent Senator James Z. George, a leading opponent. The Mississippi Encyclopedia’s entry on the Populist movement describes Burkitt traveling from county to county urging Alliance members to stand united behind Barksdale.
Newspaper accounts and later syntheses tell us that the campaign turned ugly. A state bicentennial history published by the secretary of state notes that tensions grew so fierce that “the populist leader, Frank Burkitt, was assaulted and his newspaper office was burned.” An EBSCO research starter, drawing on earlier biographies and theses, similarly reports that in October 1891 night riders destroyed his presses, burned his building, and that opponents broke into the courthouse to steal voter registration books.
The alliance candidate ultimately lost, thanks in part to fraud and intimidation, and many farmers became convinced that simply reforming the Democratic Party from within would not be enough.
In 1892 Burkitt finally broke. At the state Democratic convention that spring he served on the resolutions committee and accepted a place as one of the party’s presidential electors at large. When Congress failed to pass silver legislation and the party nominated Grover Cleveland, a hard money man, he resigned his elector’s slot and followed dissident farm leaders into the new People’s or Populist Party.
From his editor’s chair in Okolona he unleashed some of the most colorful rhetoric in Mississippi politics. In an article later quoted by Mississippi History Now, he denounced the Bourbon wing of the party as a “putrid, putrescent, putrifying political moribund carcass of bourbon democracy.”
The Georgia newspaper Jackson Economist reprinted one of his longer pieces on money and trusts in April 1899. In that article Burkitt argued that paper currency issued directly by the federal government would be superior to gold and silver and insisted that “the best money on earth would be the full legal tender greenback bill issued from the U. S. treasury and made receivable for all dues public and private.” The same clipping printed under his byline a short essay titled “The People, Not the Trusts, Need Protection,” attacking protective tariffs that benefited large industrial combines.
Primary sources like these clippings give a feel for his voice that no later summary can quite capture. He mixed rural metaphors, Biblical cadence, and practical examples into a style that contemporaries called “wool hat politics.”
Candidate Burkitt: Congress, governor, and a brush with the vice presidency
The Populist Party moved quickly in Mississippi. In the 1892 elections the party ran candidates in every congressional district except the Delta. Mississippi History Now notes that all of them lost, but that Burkitt, running in the Fourth District in north Mississippi, made the strongest showing, capturing about 39 percent of the vote against Democrat Hernando de Soto Money.
Two years later he carried the Populist banner even higher. In 1895 he ran for governor on a platform of railroad regulation, tax reform, and currency expansion. Official vote tallies summarized in modern reference works show Democrat Anselm J. McLaurin winning easily with just over 72 percent of the vote, while Burkitt took roughly 28 percent, or about 18,000 votes statewide. It was a decisive defeat, yet for a brief moment he embodied the strongest third party challenge the Redeemer regime had faced since Reconstruction.
Populism peaked nationally in the 1890s and fractured badly in 1896, when Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan adopted much of the Populist monetary platform. At the Populist national convention that year, middle of the road delegates who opposed fusion briefly promoted Burkitt as their choice for vice president. A study of the Populist press notes that some western insurgents favored “Burkitt, from Okolona, Mississippi” for the second slot. He did receive support but lost out to Georgia’s Tom Watson.
By 1900 the Mississippi Populist Party had largely disintegrated. The Mississippi Encyclopedia estimates that while some 130 Populists held office at one time or another, most served in minor local roles. The Populists failed as a durable party, but many of their ideas about railroad regulation, direct primaries, and tax policy eventually seeped into law under Democratic leaders like James K. Vardaman and Theodore Bilbo, as Mississippi History Now points out.
Back to the Democrats and on to direct democracy
Once the Populist structure collapsed, Burkitt returned to the Democratic fold, but he did not entirely abandon his reform instincts. Rowland’s Register and modern reference works agree that he rejoined the party around 1900, was elected again to the state House in 1907, and then moved up to the state Senate in 1911 as a Democrat from a district that included Chickasaw, Calhoun, and Pontotoc Counties.
In those final years he championed one reform that is easy to overlook: the initiative and referendum. Ballotpedia’s history of Mississippi’s initiative process credits Representative N. A. Mott of Yazoo City and Representative Frank Burkitt of Okolona with pushing an initiative and referendum amendment through the legislature twice in the early twentieth century so that it could appear on the statewide ballot. Voters approved it by a wide margin in 1914, although the measure later ran into legal challenges.
That same year, on 18 November 1914, the Grand Lodge of Illinois’s printed proceedings recorded a short notice that “Frank Burkitt, Past Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Mississippi, died November 18, 1914.” The remark speaks both to his prominence in Mississippi Freemasonry and to his regional reach. He had once served as Grand Master of the state Masons and as Grand Commander of the Knights Templar while still editing the People’s Messenger.
Find a Grave and local histories place his burial in the Odd Fellows Cemetery at Okolona, the town whose politics and public life he had shaped for more than forty years.
Reading Burkitt through the archives
For anyone interested in tracing Burkitt’s career beyond a summary biography, the surviving paper trail is unusually rich for a small town editor.
The Frank Burkitt Papers at Mississippi State University’s Special Collections, cataloged as MSS 162, occupy only a fraction of a cubic foot but preserve clippings and articles from Okolona papers, including the Chickasaw Messenger and People’s Messenger, between roughly 1888 and 1912. Those clippings capture his editorials on money, railroads, schools, and party politics in his own words.
Bound volumes and microfilm of the Chickasaw Messenger and People’s Messenger survive at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History and at Mississippi State. Chronicling America’s entry for The People’s Messenger confirms its identification with Populism, lists Okolona as its place of publication, and credits Burkitt as publisher. Individual items like the Jackson Economist reprints of his monetary and anti trust essays, accessible through the Georgia Historic Newspapers project, show how his ideas circulated beyond Mississippi.
The official Civil War and Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi collection preserves his 1880 letter to Governor John M. Stone asking to carry the state’s electoral vote to Washington. The proceedings of the 1890 constitutional convention record his speeches and his solitary vote against the disfranchising constitution. Mississippi History Now reproduces a photograph from the Mississippi Department of Archives and History that shows him in middle age, the moustached editor who made such a stir in the 1890s.
On the genealogical side, Lawrence County, Tennessee resources such as the Lawrence County Heritage tables and published Bible and tombstone records confirm the presence of Burkitt and related families in the county, including references to Burgess Burkitt’s executor settlement and to multiple Burkitt entries in compiled volumes. Online family histories at MSGenWeb and on Geni stitch these details into multi generation narratives that link Frank back to Lemuel Burkitt in North Carolina and forward to descendants scattered across the South and Midwest.
Taken together, these primary sources allow us to read Burkitt not only as a name in a textbook but as a working editor and organizer who spent decades arguing with his neighbors in print.
Why a Mississippi wool hat matters to Appalachian history
At first glance, a Populist editor from Okolona, Mississippi might seem far removed from the coal camps and mountain hollers usually featured on AppalachianHistorian.org. Yet Burkitt’s life traces the same arcs of migration, class conflict, and rural protest that shaped the broader upland South.
His family moved along the old routes from North Carolina into the Tennessee uplands, then south toward new cotton lands. The farmers he championed in the Black Prairie worried about many of the same things that troubled smallholders in eastern Kentucky or southwest Virginia: crop liens, railroad freight rates, monopolies in fertilizer and cotton ginning, and an education system that seemed to favor wealthier towns.
The language he used, from the proud embrace of the wool hat crowd to his scathing description of Bourbon Democrats, belongs to a wider late nineteenth century southern tradition where class and region tangled uneasily with race. In Mississippi, as in much of Appalachia, white insurgents like Burkitt sought to restrain corporate and planter power but almost never questioned the underlying system of white supremacy. When disfranchisement came, they argued about its effect on poor whites more often than its effect on Black neighbors.
Studying Frank Burkitt through letters, legislative records, and the fragile pages of the Chickasaw and People’s Messenger reminds us that Appalachian history does not stop at the state line. The same wool hats and worn coats turn up from the Cumberland Plateau to the Black Prairie, and the same fights over money, schools, and political voice ripple through all those landscapes.
Sources and further reading
Official and Statistical Register of the State of Mississippi, 1912 edition, biographical sketch of “Frank Burkitt, of Okolona,” which covers his ancestry, education, Confederate service, editorship, Masonic leadership, and legislative career.Internet Archive
Proceedings and debates of the 1890 Mississippi Constitutional Convention, especially the franchise committee records and Burkitt’s speech opposing the disfranchising provisions that would affect poor whites as well as Black voters.Mississippi Encyclopedia
Frank Burkitt Papers, MSS 162, Special Collections, Mississippi State University, containing clippings and articles from the Chickasaw Messenger and People’s Messenger from approximately 1888 to 1912.Scholars Junction+1
The Chickasaw Messenger and The People’s Messenger (Okolona, Mississippi), available on microfilm at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History and Mississippi State University; cataloged in Chronicling America as Populist leaning newspapers published by Frank Burkitt.The Library of Congress+1
Letter from Capt. Frank Burkitt to Governor John M. Stone, 6 November 1880, in the Civil War and Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi Project, in which Burkitt requests appointment as bearer of Mississippi’s electoral vote to Washington.FromThePage
“The People, Not the Trusts, Need Protection” and related monetary essays by Frank Burkitt, reprinted in The Jackson Economist (Winder, Georgia), 6 April 1899, accessed through Georgia Historic Newspapers.Georgia Historic Newspapers
Photograph of Frank Burkitt reproduced in “Farmers, the Populist Party, and Mississippi (1870–1900),” Mississippi History Now, courtesy of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History.mshistorynow.mdah.ms.gov
Records and indexes from Lawrence County, Tennessee, including executor settlements and Bible and tombstone compilations that document Burgess Burkitt, Henry Lemuel Burkitt, and related family members.home.lorettotel.net+1
Find A Grave memorial for Capt. Benjamin Franklin “Frank” Burkitt, giving his dates, summary of his political career, and burial in Odd Fellows Cemetery at Okolona.Find a Grave
“Benjamin Franklin Burkitt,” Mississippi Encyclopedia, which offers a concise scholarly biography emphasizing his role as an agrarian leader, his work with the Grange and Farmers’ Alliance, his opposition to parts of the 1890 constitution, and his Populist candidacies.Mississippi Encyclopedia+1
“Farmers’ Alliance and Colored Farmers’ Alliance,” “Populist Movement,” and “Populist Party,” Mississippi Encyclopedia entries that set Burkitt’s career within the broader context of Mississippi agrarian politics, interracial organizing, and third party challenges.Mississippi Encyclopedia+2Mississippi Encyclopedia+2
“Farmers, the Populist Party, and Mississippi (1870–1900),” Mississippi History Now, which highlights Burkitt as a leading Populist editor and candidate and quotes his most vivid attacks on Bourbon democracy.mshistorynow.mdah.ms.gov
Frank Burkitt, Research Starter (EBSCO), which synthesizes his life story for students and notes events such as the burning of his newspaper office during the 1891 subtreasury campaign.EBSCO
Lilibel Broadway, “Frank Burkitt: The Man in the Wool Hat” (master’s thesis, Mississippi State College, 1948), along with the later article of the same name, both of which draw heavily on his editorials and speeches.JSTOR+1
Stephen Cresswell, Multiparty Politics in Mississippi, 1877–1902, and Albert D. Kirwan, Revolt of the Rednecks: Mississippi Politics, 1876–1925, which place Burkitt among a wider generation of agrarian insurgents in the post Reconstruction South.Mississippi Encyclopedia
Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment, and John D. Hicks, The Populist Revolt, for national context on the Populist movement and the wool hat politics that linked farmers from the Appalachian uplands to the Mississippi Black Prairie.Ethernet