Ecru City Park
Introduction
Text-to-speech Audio
The Blake Mounce Memorial Park or Ecru City Park is a hub of activity and a landmark of Ecru, MS. This park is the gathering place for celebrations, t-ball, softball, and baseball games, community-wide Easter Egg Hunts, and an annual memorial 5k "fun" run which raises money to support the park's services. The Ecru City Park is the site of the first celebration of "M.B. Mayfield Day" which took place in July 14, 1988, and it is an important part of the M.B. Mayfield Heritage Trail.
Images
Ecru Park Baseball Field (Picture by James Geiger)
Sign Honoring Cpl. Blake Mounce (by Hank Weisner for Pontotoc Progress)
Ecru Park Playset (Picture by James Geiger)
Backstory and Context
Text-to-speech Audio
Ecru recognized M.B. Mayfield as its most prominent citizen on that day of celebration in July of 1988 at the Ecru City Park. The honor came two years after M.B. Mayfield was invited to exhibit his art in 1986 at the University of Mississippi (UM) Museum in Oxford. Mr. Mayfield donated several of his paintings to the UM Museum from the exhibit.
Ecru City Park's Community Center was once the cafeteria for the town's segregation era school, the Ecru High School. The brick high school building was torn down after school consolidation ending racial segregation of the public schools in Pontotoc County. The only remaining building associated with Ecru High School, the community center hosts family and community events and is the voting precinct where Ecru residents cast their votes in elections.
Ecru City Park's name was changed in 2005 to the Blake Mounce Memorial Park in memory of another Ecru resident, USMC Corporal Black Mounce. Corporal Mounce was killed in the line of duty in Iraq on July 14, 2005. M.B. Mayfield painted a commissioned portrait of Corporal Blake Mounce's grandparents, Flake and Dorothy Mounce of Ecru in 1980, and that painting was donated by the couple's children in the Summer of 2023 to the M.B. Mayfield Foundation. Mr. Mayfield died in June of 2005, a month prior to the untimely death of USMC Corporal Blake Mounce.
Original text-Jasper (Emily) Slides
Updates-Jeannie Speck-Thompson
Sources
Mayfield, M.B. The Baby Who Crawled Backwards: An Autobiography. Memphis, TN. Langford and Associates, 2003.
Wiesner, Hank. "Blake Mounce Park Honors Marine's Legacy," Pontotoc Progress. July 4, 2018.
Picture by James Geiger
Picture by James Geiger