Museum to host roundtable discussion of Union County sports history Thursday

Museum Moments at the Union County Heritage Museum will be Thursday April 15, at noon featuring a Union County Sports History Roundtable. It will be a journey down memory lane as the effort continues to gather information in the creation of a sports history exhibit.

The public is invited to come and reminisce as Robert Merritt, Sam Mosley, Bill and Bob Cossitt, Charley Neal Huffstatler, Tom Haynes and Miles Johnson talk about great sporting moments of Union County’s past.  A sack lunch will be provided to attendees.

Great athletes, great plays, great games of Union County is part of an upcoming exhibit.  The museum is in the process of collecting stories about people and events for The Sporting Life Exhibit.  This event is one of several planned to collect information for the exhibit.

The museum has information in the sports history of Union County that covers a wide group of people and heart-stopping moments, and there is a need for more information.

“We need your help,” said Jill Smith, Museum Director.  “Because we don’t have all the information we want. We don’t want to leave anyone out of the permanent exhibit that is in the works.”

In this, the 30^th anniversary year of the Union County Historical Society, the effort is on to create a permanent exhibit featuring the athletes, the coaches, the games, the big moments that make up the patchwork of great sports history.

The museum is working with Design 500, an exhibit design and fabrication team from Memphis who will help create the exhibit featuring basketball, football, baseball, softball, tennis, soccer, hunting, fishing and more.  The players who have gone on to professional careers such as Eli Whiteside, Armentie Price, John Stroud, Gene Howe, Wayne West, Earnest Kennedy, Marcus Green, Chase Porch, Janice Downs Davidson, Boy Boyd, Doc Marshall  and there are many more.  There is a long list of great players and great moments in the sporting life of this county in professional sports, in college and in high school, and the goal of the museum is to capture them all.

“The help of the public is needed for this to be successful,” Smith said.

“We have developed forms for nominations for players to be included in the exhibit. They will eventually be available on line, but for now they are at the museum. And they can be emailed to people who want to nominate someone to be included in the exhibit.”

The exhibit is designed to have permanent exhibit space at the museum as well as a searchable digital kiosk of games, players and interesting interviews. Interviews of former players are currently underway to add to the depth of the exhibit.

The Sporting Life of Union County will also include the hunters such as Chico Foote and others as well as the nationally-known bird dog trainers Gordon Simmons and Clyde Morton, whose record of National Field Trial wins has never been broken.  He along with this famous dog appeared on Purina Dog Food sacks in stores across the nation.

The grand slam teams down through the years and the heart-stopping plays that are retold are all part of the exciting story of Union County’s sporting life.

If you have a player or a story that you want to share with this project, please call the museum at 662-538-0014, email at uchm@ucheritagemuseum.com, or stop by the museum, located at 114 Cleveland Street, New Albany, MS.

“Help us make this exhibit as wonderful as we know it can be,” Smith said.