Costume sketches and letters to Paris: What created Memphis Mardi Gras and what remains?
One of several invitations to Memphis Mardi Gras events in the 1870s in the Colton Greene Collection. (Memphis and Shelby County Room, Memphis Public Library & Information Center)
The Memphis version of Mardi Gras is nearly forgotten more than 150 years after the first one in 1872. When it isn’t forgotten, it’s remembered as the party that was killed by the 1878 Yellow Fever epidemic that almost ended the city’s existence.
The remains of Memphis Mardi Gras can be found in archival boxes in the Memphis and Shelby County Room of the Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library and on the Memphis Public Libraries’ DIG Memphis page where invoices, letters to Paris, press clippings and rough sketches of costumes have been digitized.
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Bill Dries
Bill Dries covers city and county government and politics. He is a native Memphian and has been a reporter for almost 50 years covering a wide variety of stories from the 1977 death of Elvis Presley and the 1978 police and fire strikes to numerous political campaigns, every county mayor and every Memphis Mayor starting with Wyeth Chandler.
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