ONWARD – Growing up near Washington D.C., Miriam Bowden treasured the summers she spent visiting family in the Mississippi Delta. She got to engage with a world foreign to her own, she fondly recalled, playing in the fields, fishing and foraging.

“Even though I am truly a city child, every spot of countryness I could find, I gravitated towards it,” she said. 

Decades later, Bowden now owns one of the south Delta’s most well-known institutions, the Onward Store along U.S. 61, or the “blues highway,” in Sharkey County. Over the last century, the business has worn a number of hats: restaurant, gas station, post office, gift shop. The store also boasts a claim to fame most Mississippians are familiar with.

Just down the road, in 1902, then-president Theodore Roosevelt ventured on a bear hunt with Holt Collier, an esteemed marksman and former slave. After the president had little to show for the outing, Collier cornered a bear to give Roosevelt an easy shot. But, as the legend goes, Roosevelt considered the maneuver “unsportsmanlike,” and instead let the bear run free. News of the trip reached a toymaker in New York, and the popular Teddy Bear spread from there. 

Bowden retired in 2021 from her job of nearly 20 years, teaching theater to middle and high schoolers in Maryland. When the COVID-19 pandemic shrunk her usual classroom into a computer screen, her joy quickly faded, she said. 

She originally moved to Mississippi in 2023 to take care of the 320-acre farm her great grandfather bought years and years ago, located just south of Mayersville in the south Delta – or, as she described, “in the middle of nowhere.” 

But about a year later, Bowden drove past the Onward Store and saw a “for sale” sign posted outside. Right there and then, she found her new calling. 

In a rural area with scant economic growth and where it can take hours of driving to find groceries, the store is much more than a historical maker. It’s a nexus for locals and travelers to refresh, replenish and reunite. 

Even more crucial for Bowden, reviving the business – which has been closed since January, 2024 – means reconnecting herself with a community her family left its mark on. 

On the same farm where her mother, aunts and uncles grew up, her grandfather, Henry Sias, hosted Civil Rights icons Fannie Lou Hamer and Stokely Carmichael, Bowden said. Sias also headed the local “colored” school. Her family, she added, took part in the 1960s Freedom Rides, and even joined Hamer when she gave her famous speech at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. Bowden’s cousin, she said, had to drive Hamer around because she couldn’t drive herself. 

“That’s part of my family history as far as I’m concerned,” she said.   

While it wasn’t the case when her family bought the property, the land is now one of the few Black-owned farms in the heavily agricultural area, Bowden added. 

The journey to reopen the Onward Store hasn’t been cheap. Even with the help of a couple of loans, buying and renovating the shop, including tearing up rotted floors, have drained her entire savings.

“I would say that I’ve bet my future on this store,” said Bowden, now 62. 

Unsure how soon she’ll have her full vision of the store ready, Bowden is hoping to at least have the deli open by the end of 2025. There, she plans to serve a variety of lunch staples, especially local classics: hoop cheese, crawfish salad, egg salad, bologna salad, hogshead cheese and pimento loaf. 

But she also wants to transform the Onward Store, which she said had become somewhat of a tourist trap over the years, into something new. Bowden wants to add books and photographs showcasing the local blues culture, for instance. After all, she said, Muddy Waters grew up just around the corner. 

And in addition to selling hunting supplies and retro toys – yes, including the Teddy Bear – Bowden wants the Onward Store to serve as a vehicle for local goods, like vegetables and crafts. In an area with few jobs, she hopes her investment in the space can encourage and support other local business owners. 

Since she started repairs on the store a few months ago, visitors have constantly walked in, hoping it was finally open. Not yet, Bowden would tell them, but she would take their phone number down to let them know when it’s time to return. 

“ The community really wants to see it happen, and I want to make it happen for them,” she said. “Ever since I first started looking at this place, it’s been like a mission, and I think of it as my sacred duty to have this place where people can gather and have good food and conversation and everything. That is important.”

While it’s taken some acclimating to the rural lifestyle, Bowden said she’s found her happiness in Mississippi that went away during the pandemic. 

“We (up North) have some pretty bad opinions about (Mississippi), some of them are real, but a lot of them are not,” she said. “Beyond the notorious things about here, there is absolute beauty. I have found peace since I’ve been down here living on the family farm. That has been awesome.

“I can go out on my porch and look up in the sky and see the Milky Way at night. I could never do that in Washington, D.C. There’s such beauty here and there’s peace and there’s some good people here.”