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By
1928 the first school, Duling Elementary, was constructed in Fondren,
and the automobile had arrived to replace the streetcar.
This change in times and economic prosperity would
eliminate the need for the small lots required to
keep people close to the trolley line and allow larger,
estate size planning, such as evidenced by the Woodland Hills neighborhood.
Following World War II a post-war building boom added
significantly to the housing stock to accommodate
returning GIs. The suburbs had arrived and the diversity
of the Fondren community was enhanced.
In the 1940's the first speculative suburban shopping
center in Mississippi, Morgan Center, now known as Woodland Hills Shopping center, was built just north of the
fork. The center was Art Deco in style and it influenced
a number of similar designs in the area, such as the location of Walker's Drive In. An Art Deco movie
theater, the Pix/Capri was built in 1939 and became the first Jackson theater to locate outside of the
downtown area.
Jackson's first suburban "high-rise" office
building, the Dale Building, was erected in Fondren in 1956, where the current Fondren Corner development exists. Additional shopping, banks, gas stations, hardware
stores, barber shops, drug stores, restaurants and
churches were added to the mix. In this rush of development,
David Fondren's grocery first relocated across the
street, and then succumbed to the competition of both
a local grocery chain and an A&P Food Store. It
closed in 1953, but the commercial center it started
continues to thrive today.
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The Fondren neighborhood
began in 1833 as part of a large 5,000 acre plantation
located three miles north of Jackson, Mississippi. Owned
by the Garland family, it was broken up during the Reconstruction
Era following the Civil War. A small settlement had formed
at the extreme southwest part of the area, nestled in
the fork between Canton Road and the old Tougaloo Plantation
Road, now called North State Street. The fork was also
the location of a state asylum which later became the
area for construction of four Fondren area hospitals.
The initial inhabitants of the community worked in the
hospital, and the only store at the fork was David Fondren's
General Merchandise and Fancy Grocery. In 1894 a government
post office located in the store adopted the Fondren name
for the community. The Fondren Post Office continues today,
located about one-hundred yards to the north of the original
store site. In
the early years a trolley line ran from downtown Jackson
to the hospital, ending at a turntable near the fork,
across from the asylum. The hospital moved its 1,200
patients to Whitfield in 1918 and the site eventually
became the University of Mississippi Medical Center. Fondren was becoming
a well established community by then, and was supporting
commercial ventures such as restaurants, a drugstore and a hardware store. The city of Jackson to the south
was growing as well, and in 1925 the city annexed
the Fondren area. It was the first time that a developed
community would be included in a Jackson annexation,
and is the reason that Fondren has a "small town
feel" within the larger metro area. Although Fondren
had succumbed to "urban sprawl" it would still maintain
it's small town character in the years to come. |
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