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BALDWYN — In rural Prentiss County, on a triangle of land cornered between a stretch of U.S. 45 and Twenty Mile Creek, Joanna Byrd McDowell walked her two petite leashed dogs on a narrow clay path a few feet above the creek on a drizzly November morning. Taking her hand momentarily off the path’s parallel metal railing, she bent down and stuck her fingers in the brown clay.
When they emerged from the rain-laden dirt, her palm had in it a rounded shell fragment from an oyster. She spotted another connecting piece nearby, and her hand returned to the earth.
