Crystal Springs writer pushed conservation

Special to Wesson News

Courtesy of Mississippi Department of Archives and History

The Mother of Mississippi’s conservation tradition, writer Francis (Fannye) Adine Cook, acquired her lifelong passion as a farmer’s daughter who collected wild plants, birds, mammals and amphibians as a child growing up in a Crystal Springs Victorian home on Georgetown Street in the early 1900s.

Born July 19, 1889, she was the seventh child of Gilbert and Martha Ellen Cook and would follow a career as a teacher, auditor, researcher and genealogist as well as a writer and conservationist after graduating from the Industrial Institute and College (new Mississippi University for Women) in 1911 and completing graduate studies at George Washington University in Washington, DC.

After teaching history and English literature at West Point and Louisville in Mississippi and in Wyoming and Panama, Cook worked as an auditor with the Internal Revenue Service, while researching and preparing specimens for the Smithsonian Institute and becoming concerned about public indifference in Mississippi to protection of natural resources and the state’s inadequate laws and failure to enforce existing ones.  In the 1920s, she returned to travel her home state at her own expense and campaign for a comprehensive state conservation program, speaking at local fairs and to schools, clubs and county supervisors and exhibiting a poster which illustrated the usefulness of birds in combatting harmful insects.  Her efforts led to organization of the Mississippi Association for the Conservation of Wildlife, which became the Game and Fish Commission, and she supervised a state plant and animal survey funded by the federal Works Progress Administration.

Cook collected and cataloged Mississippi wildlife, led the effort to restore the state’s natural environment, pushed for public hunting grounds, conservation laws and education, fish and streams, hawks and owls to control rats and mice, song birds, holly, wild crabapples, dogwood and azalea to beautify roadsides and woodlands, and rallied people to appreciate the outdoors.

Cook also started writing, perhaps influenced, inspired and encouraged by Eurora Welty whom she got to know when boarding at the Welty home in Jackson, where she kept a stash of deceased birds in her desk for scientific study.  Her numerous articles and several books included Freshwater Fishes of Mississippi and Snakes of Mississippi.  She became the first director of the Mississippi Wildlife Museum, now the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science, where her personal collection of papers is the basis of a 10,000-volume library; and helped organize the Mississippi Ornithological Society.

When Cook wasn’t focused on conservation issues, she and her sister, Lena Mae Brignac, documented cemeteries, producing invaluable records, particularly for markers and cemeteries no longer extant.

Cook died April 30, 1964, and she is buried at Crystal Springs City Cemetery.  A life-sized bronze statue commemorate her at Railroad Park in downtown Crystal Springs and a 2600-acre urban nature area is named in her honor in Rankin County.