LAUREL, MS (Mississippi News Now) -
South of Laurel, on Highway 15 a few miles, is Landrum's Homestead and Village. Well over 20 years ago Tom Landrum had in mind building an old one room school house and maybe hiring a teacher for a few days in the summer to show the kids how it "used to be."
As it turned out, that wasn't the first building he built. It was a little house where he put some of his old furniture.
Tom says that they, "Cut our own timber, and had a little timber left over and built a barn."
A barn and a blacksmith's shop, and by then they were on a roll so they built the school they originally intended to build. It was shaping up to be a little community, so they needed a church. And after that it really blossomed.
"Kind of got, we got carried away, really," said Landrum.
Once you park the car in the parking lot and walk through the doors and out the back into the village you are instantly transported back in time, to a place of sounds of things being done, and of wood smoke and simplicity, although it was pretty complicated at the time.
An interesting building is the mystery house where even gravity doesn't work here the same as it does in the rest of the world.
"Everything here is a talking point," said Landrum. "We have electricity but we don't have TVs or anything like that. But, I just think that it is being together as a family or atmosphere of a family."
It's the days of our grandparents or great-grandparents. It seems to be a lot more peaceful and less hectic than nowadays. Probably because it was.
We're more modern outside the gates of Landrum's Village. But it is up for debate whether we've really progressed all that much since the simple days represented here.
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