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Hello. I'm responding to your Forrest Co., MS, posting in reponse to my earlier posting about Forrest County Agricultural High School FORRESTERS (school yearbook). I'm fairly confident that no individual school pictures (as we understand the term today) were made in most South Mississippi country schools in the 1920s or 1930s.
FCAHS opened for business in 1912, but the first FORRESTER was published about 1940. Compositie photographs of the graduating classes with individual portraits were made at FCAHS beginning in the mid-1930s and the large, framed composite photographs are still on display in the halls of the the John C. Gay Building on the FCAHS campus. Graduates received 8x10 copies of the composite class photo. My mother graduated there in 1936 and her photo is among those in the Class of 1936.
Dixie School in my home community was established in 1922 as a consolidated high school, with grades above 8 being transferred to FCAHS after about 1930. Typical for rural schools of the time and place, Dixie published its very first yearbook in 1952 or 1953. I don't think school pictures (as we know them now) were even made at Dixie until after I graduated from the 8th grade there in May of 1950 -- at least I know that our family has no school pictures of me from Dixie (although that could be because we lacked money to purchase any that were made). There are some group class photos, however, particularly of the graduating 8th grade classes, plus snapshots made and owned by various teachers and former students. In some of those made in the 1920s, I have found photos of some of my aunts and uncles. There is extant, a least one photo made about 1905 of the students of the Wes Brown Consolidated School in what is now the Dixie Community. Miss Carrie Koonce was the teacher that year.
In 1920 the Forrest County Board of Supervisors published a report on the schools of the county which contained a photograph of each school building, often including the teachers and students of that school. However, no identification of any persons pictured is included in the report and getting accurate identifications is exceptionally difficult since the persons pictured are almost all gone now. A photocopy of the report is held by the Hattiesburg Area Historical Society.
On the other hand, most Mississippi colleges did have school yearbooks before 1920, including Mississippi College, Mississippi Woman's College, and State Teachers College (now University of Southern Mississippi). I know this because I have some copies of a few Womans College and Mississippi College yearbooks in the first third of the twentieth century, plus a few photocopies from early State Teachers College yearbooks (STC/USM began about 1912 also). I found in the MWC yearbook a photo of my grandmother's older sister when she was about 18 or so.
It is possible that Hattiesburg High School had composite class photographs earlier than the 1930s. Those photographs were at one time on display in the old Hattiesburg High School building on North Main Street, and are now (I'm pretty sure) under the care of the Hattiesburg Area Historical Society which has headquarters in the old Hattiesburg Public Library building on Main Street, just a block or so north of the county courthouse. I do not know when Hattiesburg High published its first yearbook.
I hope this information will be of some use to you in your search. Best wishes, Gerald Buchanan
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