Homesteaded by Joseph Hopson in the 1830s, by 1921 the plantation had grown to four thousand acres, inducing the Y&MV Railroad to build a spur to its commissary. From 1935 to 1944, Howell Hopson II collaborated with the International Harvester Company to develop a machine to pick cotton bolls. In 1944, the first-ever mechanized cotton harvest occurred at this plantation, a death blow to the century-old sharecropping and tenant system. Mechanization caused African Americans to migrate from the region, and depopulation was so complete that by the 1980s the Hopson Commissary complex was endangered. To save it, the Hopson Preservation Company began renovating the remaining buildings and moving abandoned Delta tenant shacks to this site. The complex opened as Shack Up Inn in 1988 and now includes about twenty vintage and new shacks, the oldest being the 1883 cabin brought from nearby Rich.
The two-story corrugated metal commissary (1905), with a full-width porch, shaped parapet, and a ventilator, served as grocery store, meeting place, and plantation office and is now a dance hall. To the north, the corrugated metal cotton gin, built in 1933 after the previous gin burned, has been converted to guest rooms. The large metal-clad seed house (1930s, E. G. Morris, builder) at the north end was used for drying and delinting seed from the gin and bagging it for shipping. At the rear of the complex, the long tractor shed was built in the early 1930s when Hopson began using tractors instead of mules. The tile-brick grain silos date to after 1937 when the Hopsons diversified with Hereford cattle. The Hopson family still owns and farms the surrounding land.