Lick Skillet is the name that a few people – mostly old-times – give to the stretch along Jim Ramsay Road out of Vancleave, while residents of this friendly, rural community call it Greenhead.

To the post office it is “north” Ocean Springs and others say it is on the fringe of the Fort Bayou settlement. No matter what this place is called, it has been peaceful, happy haven to the families who have been here for six or seven generations.

“You can say we’re just a little spot between Vancleave and Latimer,” says lifelong resident Rosa Lee Batson Payton. A descendant of most of Greenhead’s early families, Mrs. Payton, now in her 70s, remembers far back into her childhood when Greenhead was more of a remote spot than it is today. She often regrets that she didn’t ask about the history of the area when she was growing up and the old people were still alive.

Why the community is either called Lick Skillet and Greenhead is a question Mrs. Payton’s children often ask her that neither she, nor others in the community, can answer.

“I don’t know why it was called that. My children used to say, I didn’t lick a skillet and my head isn’t green,” she joked.

The small branch that runs off Bluff Creek, north of Greenhead Cemetery Road, is called Greenhead Branch. Whether the community was named after the branch, or the branch was named after the community, is a chicken-or-egg question.

Family stories, land and census records indicate that Greenhead started with five black families form North Carolina, who established homes here after the Civil War and each bought about 160 acres of land. The Burneys, Paytons, Reeds, Flowers, and Chambers were the founding families of Greenhead. The Batsons came later from the Latimer area and more recently, the Harrises and Wrights arrived in the neighborhood, Mrs. Payton said. Land records of the late 1860s and 1870s show many other names, including Willis Shaw, William Martin and Elijah Marshall, who may have owned property, but not necessarily lived in this area.

Through the generations, this area has stayed a predominantly black community and the descendants of the original families often married their neighbors, intertwining the community more by both blood and friendship.

In the western part of Greenhead from the early days were the vast landholdings of Thomas Ramsay and his family. The Lockards lived to the east. A close relationship has developed among these families over the generations. "It is a nice community, everyone is friendly,” said Marilena Penton, the daughter of Thomas’ son James A. “Jim” Ramsay, for whom the long road that connects Mississippi 57 to Latimer. She and her husband, George, live in the old Jim Ramsay homestead, a country cottage built about 1914.

They check on each other in illness, rejoice in happy times and comfort each other in times of sadness, she said. “It’s one of the most pleasant little communities in South Mississippi. They are friends with everyone,” Mrs. Penton said.

The heart of the community for most of its existence has been Good Hope Baptist Church on Jim Ramsay Road. The exact age of the congregation at Greenhead is unknown, but the people have worshipped in at least four sanctuaries over the years.

Mrs. Payton said one early church, which doubled as a school, burned. After a new one was built in the early 1900s on the land of Silas Burney has endured, but it is no longer used for worship services. A modern, cement block building was built on the same site to service the congregation of less than 100, now led by full time pastor, the Rev. John H. Richardson Sr.

“We once had baptisms in Bluff Creek, then behind Dee’s Store. Now every church has a pool,” Mrs. Payton said.

The cemetery, where several generations of Good Hope congregation have been buried, is located off Greenhead Cemetery Road. More land was recently given to extend the burial site by the Ramsay family.

When the first settlers moved in there were few schools in that part of Jackson County. In the 1890s, the Greenhead School was located between Jim Ramsey Road and Bluff Creek, east of the joining of Fort Bayou Road and Jim Ramsay Road.

When this school was destroyed by fire in the 1920s, the Greenhead students went another school centrally located between Greenhead and Vancleave.

Mrs. Payton said one of the early teachers was Georgia Burney of Vancleave and another one was a Mrs. Sheffield of Moss Point.

Dr. James Lockard, one of the founders of Jackson County Hospital in Pascagoula, lived east of Greenhead and Vancleave’s Dr. S.R. Ratliff paid housecalls in the community. But most of the babies were delivered by one of the several midwives of the area. One of them was Rosa Lee Payton’s great-grandmother, Mariah Burney, who possibly worked for the Havens family at one time. Land records show that Henry Havens was a property owner in that area in the 1860s.

As long as anyone can recall, there was never a post office at Greenhead and in the history of this spot there were only a few stores where residents could buy small items. “For groceries we went into Vancleave,” Mrs. Payton said.

To provide for their families in the old days the people of Greenhead farmed their land, growing corn and other vegetables and kept cows sheep and hogs. Many of the younger men worked at the large Ramsay farm. A common occupation in the 1800s and early 1900s was charcoal burning, or making charcoal from timber to produce fuel that homes needed for ironing and to keep furnaces going.

There are some large gardens at Greenhead, but the farms and stock are gone and today most of the people work in Ocean Springs, Vancleave, or in the industries at Pascagoula and Moss Point. Gradually, Greenhead’s population is getting older. “The children grow up, finish school, marry and move away,” Mrs. Payton said. She and her husband, Frazier, have had 15 children in their 54 years of marriage and are helping to raise a few grandchildren. The original 160-acre land holdings have been subdivided many times over the generations and families who stay live close to each other.

The homes are neat and modern – frame, asbestos shingle or brick – with a few mobile homes here and there. They are a far cry form the log homes that the settlers built when they moved into the area more than 100 years ago, Mrs. Payton said.

The men felled huge logs from the virgin timber that thickly covered the area, and used them to build dirt-floor homes, daubing the openings with clay. In the 1900s, the log homes were gradually replaced by those of finished wood. But the old practice of making clay chimneys persisted in the 1920s. The families would get together and have work parties and make a chimney in one day. A framework of wood, composed for four poles, would be placed outside the house. Then the workers would pull the longs, hay-like grass that grew there in abundance and wrap it in the clay. “They’d roll it good so that it wouldn’t catch fire,” Mrs. Payton said. The clay-grass compound, which would harden, would be molded around the framework into a chimney.

The old homes, clay chimneys, primitive farming tools and creek baptisms are all in the past for Greenhead. But one gets that feeling that no one is in a hurry to keep up with the times. There are many memories in this pleasant place – whether one calls it Lick Skillet or Greenhead—and they long to be savored.

“I guess I’m here until I die,” said Mrs. Payton. “I’ve been here all my days and I guess there is no other place for me.