8 Things Mississippians From the Delta Know That the Rest of the State Doesn’t

You can drive Highway 61 through the Delta and pass mile after mile of flat farmland.

What you can’t see from the road is the history behind it.

Here’s some of what many folks from the Delta grew up knowing, and what other Mississippians might’ve missed.

1. Chinese Grocery Stores

Chinese grocery stores in the Delta trace back to immigrants who arrived soon after the Civil War, NPR reports.

They originally came to work picking cotton.

They quickly soured on farming.

They started opening grocery stores, mostly in the Black communities where they lived.

One of those grocers, Gong Lum of Rosedale, ended up in a Supreme Court case.

His daughter Martha was a student of Chinese descent.

The school board had classified her as “colored” and barred her from a white high school.

In 1927, the justices ruled 9-0 in Gong Lum v. Rice that the board hadn’t violated the Fourteenth Amendment.

You can read the court’s opinion online at Justia.

2. Mound Bayou

Mound Bayou, a Delta town, was founded in 1887 by three cousins: Isaiah T. Montgomery, Joshua P. T. Montgomery, and Benjamin T. Green.

It had Black mayors, banks, businesses, and schools.

It eventually had a hospital.

It earned the nickname the Jewel of the Delta.

Mound Bayou is 98 percent Black, one of the largest shares of any community in the United States, according to the 2010 U.S. Census.

Booker T. Washington, Theodore Roosevelt, Andrew Carnegie, and Julius Rosenwald became de facto supporters of the town’s enterprises, the Mississippi Encyclopedia says.

You can find the town in Bolivar County, which Highway 61 divides.

3. Old Floodplain

Britannica describes the Delta as the old floodplain of the Yazoo and Mississippi rivers.

The Mississippi River bounds it on the west, and the Loess Bluffs bound it on the east.

If you drive south from just below Memphis to Vicksburg, you’re crossing what the Mississippi Encyclopedia calls an unusually flat region.

The Delta’s black alluvial soil is several feet deep.

Alluvial soil is river-deposited.

4. Delta National Forest

Delta National Forest covers about 60,000 acres in Sharkey County, according to Ducks Unlimited.

The U.S. Forest Service calls it the only bottomland hardwood forest in the National Forest System.

Bottomland hardwood forests are flooded forests that occur along streams and rivers.

Timber companies clear-cut the Delta’s swampy hardwood forest in the late 1800s, the Mississippi Encyclopedia says.

The Forest Service manages about 10,000 acres of forested wetland there, primarily for wintering waterfowl.

The forest has five green tree reservoirs, which are rotationally flooded with rainfall.

A 2019 page says all five are open to public waterfowl hunting.

If you plan to hunt there, confirm access before you go.

5. Catfish Acreage

Catfish acreage in Mississippi centers on the Delta, which the Mississippi Encyclopedia says had 85 percent of it, though the entry doesn’t date that figure.

The Delta has abundant water from shallow aquifers, while catfish farmers in east Mississippi rely on surface streams to fill their ponds.

Humphreys County had the most catfish water acres in Mississippi in 2005, at 20,600.

Belzoni, the seat of Humphreys County, has hosted a festival since 1976 to celebrate its status as the “Catfish Capital of the World.”

A 2006 article says Belzoni stages the festival every April, so check the date before you plan a trip around it.

Statewide, catfish acreage fell from 112,000 acres in 2001 to 37,000 acres in 2015, according to the encyclopedia.

That drop cost the state more than 5,000 jobs.

6. Tenant Farms

Tenant farming is a big part of Delta history, and Southern Spaces says tenants operated 92 percent of Delta farms by 1910.

Of those tenants, 95 percent were Black.

The Mississippi Encyclopedia says formerly enslaved people from the eastern South came to the Delta after the Civil War.

They saw it as a more open, almost frontier society than the regions with a long legacy of slavery.

The Mississippi Legislature created the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta Levee Board in 1884, and the board began building levees.

Floods had kept much of the Delta's land out of farming before the Civil War.

Black Delta residents were migrating to Chicago and other northern cities by the second decade of the twentieth century.

Then came paved roads.

Highway 61, which runs from New Orleans to Chicago through the Delta, became another escape route.

If you drive Highway 61 through the Delta, you're on that same road.

By the civil rights era, mechanized cotton farms relied on a few wage hands, the encyclopedia says.

They had no need for the large numbers of tenants who had long made their homes on plantations.

7. Dockery Farms

Dockery Farms began as a Delta plantation and sawmill complex that Will Dockery established in 1895.

The Mississippi Department of Archives and History says much of the Delta was still forest and swamp then.

For nearly three decades, a Mississippi Blues Trail marker says, the plantation was intermittently the home of Charley Patton, the most important early Delta blues musician.

Patton influenced many other musicians who came to Dockery, including Howlin' Wolf, Willie Brown, and Tommy Johnson.

The complex has eight original buildings, including a commissary storage building, a cotton gin, and a seed house.

Will Dockery and his farm workers designed and built the structures.

The state named the site a Mississippi Landmark in July 2017.

You can find the site on Highway 8 between Cleveland and Ruleville.

8. 1927 Levee Break

The 1927 levee break came after Delta people had experienced eleven major floods between 1858 and 1922, the Mississippi Encyclopedia says.

The 1927 flood was a defining experience.

The levee broke at Mounds Landing, upriver from Greenville, at 6:30 a.m. on April 21, 1927, according to a Mississippi Riverwalk marker.

By noon that day, the crevasse was half a mile wide and still growing.

The encyclopedia says water covered the Delta from south of Cleveland all the way to Vicksburg.

If you've driven that stretch, you've crossed what was under water in 1927.

The Flood Control Act of 1928 allocated $325 million for spillways, channels, and levee repairs.