EDWARDS — There was a time in Edwards, not too long ago, when folks knew not to mess with Nancy Duren, for she could quite literally cut your water off.

Nancy, who retired this past January as deputy clerk for the Hinds County town, had only one official duty, and that was to collect what people owed for water.

Some Edwards residents say she was abreast of all that was going on in town, not just the figures that showed up on the water meters. She was the key to getting things done, it is said, though she modestly says she simply answered the phone. Regardless, she was the lady you needed to talk to when you called city hall.

Her public career spanned 43 years and included two retirements. She began working at the Bank of Edwards when she was 17 as secretary to the president, Will Montgomery, and worked there 33 years in various capacities, including teller to loan officer to vice president. “Then they took my job and gave it to my son, Tommy,” she said. She became a bookkeeper, but first, “I taught him everything I know.” He’s now with RiverHills Bank in Vicksburg.

After the Bank of Edwards was bought by a Vicksburg company and a new building was constructed, the old one was given to Edwards as a city hall. Only Nancy’s job was new — the surroundings were the same.

“It had been a safe bank since 1904,” she said. Her old job had been pretty routine; the new one was different just about every day, and “cut-off time was really exciting.” It was a lot more than she had bargained for, she said.

Nancy, who is 78, grew up in Hinds and Warren counties near the Big Black River. She was one of the four Thornton girls who lived in the old Messenger house upstream from Bovina. Her dad came from Decatur, Miss., to Smith’s Station near Edwards in 1934 after operating a sawmill in Lena where he met his future wife.

Nancy grew up working hard. She picked cotton and worked in the cornfields and “had a fun life despite a few setbacks. Mama raised me right.”

She went to school in Edwards, then to Hinds Junior College where she played basketball, dropping out after a year because of her father’s illness.

“I was an old maid at 20 when I got married,” she said. There were two reasons: one was that her father was so strict boys were afraid to come to the house, and the other was that, if they did, her older, protective brother would warn, “Y’all better leave my sister alone.”

She met Jim, who became her husband, when her mother was working at an Edwards restaurant for Marie Angelo.

“Mama told me there were a bunch of boys who came in down there (to the restaurant). I had broken up with somebody and I wasn’t interested,” Nancy said. “But then he came into the bank and cashed his check and I got interested.” He left Edwards, but they wrote, he came back, and they decided to marry.

“We got married on a weekend because he had no time off,” she said. There wasn’t a preacher in town, so they went to Cary where they found the Methodist parson cutting his grass. After a short ceremony, they went to Vicksburg for their honeymoon.

That was in 1951, July 20, soon to be 58 years ago.

For a while, Jim and Nancy lived in Texas, but they came home because Edwards was a good place to raise a family. The Edwards that she knew, that she grew up in, had nine grocery stores, three churches, good schools, a hardware store, picture show, barber shop, pharmacy, a “high-class” clothing store and a newspaper.

Today, most of that is gone. There’s not even a grocery store in town, and the most traumatic thing that has happened in the business world was when the bank went to a sparse part-time schedule.

There are a few old houses in town, but the newest thing is the railroad bridge — functional and sturdy, but lacking the charm of the one torn down. Nancy remembers when you could safely walk anywhere in town, that there was nothing to be afraid of.

She feels the direction Edwards is going has changed, that it is becoming a bedroom community for Clinton and Vicksburg. Though part of the town burned and part of it fell down due to neglect, there are some very pretty sections with nice homes. Edwards is run by a mayor and five aldermen, but there is little tax base to pay for improvements.

The towns roots predate the War Between the States when it was land on the railroad owned by the Edwards family and was called Edwards Station. An earlier settlement a few miles away on the Big Black was called Amsterdam, and though it was abandoned about 1830 it is still a legal port of entry. Edwards was between the battles of Champion Hill and Big Black. It was bustling in the 1880s, suffered a yellow fever scare around the turn of the 19th century and was famous in the 1950s for its livestock shows.

A tragedy, the collapse of the Clear Creek bridge in 1939, temporarily put Edwards on the map again, and Nancy remembers the hero of the disaster, Sugar Man Daniels, who pulled bodies from the swirling, swollen waters of the Big Black River.

“He was a legend,” she said, and described his wanderings around town, followed by 10 or 15 dogs who always came to his whistle.

More recent brushes with fame came when parts of “The Ponder Heart” and “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” were filmed in Edwards.

Though Nancy has to go elsewhere to shop, she still worships at home, in the Edwards Baptist Church. She’s also redecorating her house, but she says, “Now I mostly just piddle.” Her five children and their families (there’s a total of 38 in the family) keep her occupied. She wasn’t concerned about staying at home all day with Jim, though she had worked over half her life. She felt they knew each other pretty well, for “after all, we’ve been married 58 years.”

She was offered the job of town clerk but didn’t want it. She feels she could have been elected mayor if she had run, but she didn’t want it “because I know too much about that job.”

One thing she doesn’t worry about is her water getting cut off. She pays it on time, she said, “because I use a bank draft.”

Gordon Cotton is an author and historian who lives in Vicksburg.