Winding along the once-navigable, cypress-lined Deer Creek, and completed in the central Delta in 1937, this stretch of old Highway 61 traverses an iconic Mississippi landscape of railroads, Indian mounds, bayous, and flat Delta fields dotted with remnants of early-twentieth-century trading communities. At the former railroad village of Estill, Deer Creek acts as a reflecting pool for New Hope Missionary Baptist Church (1918), a wooden Gothic Revival church with a corner tower and a semi-octagonal apse. Its congregation composed mostly of black landowners numbered three hundred in the 1930s but dwindled due to depopulation, and the church closed in 1998. Across the creek, the two-story Colonial Revival Atterbury House (c. 1900) features a flared hipped roof and an Ionic porch wrapping three sides.
At Arcola, founded in 1846 and the only incorporated town between Hollandale and Leland, a block of late-1930s one-story commercial buildings reflects the shift of commercial activity from the railroad to this newly paved highway. The buildings on the road’s east side extend over Deer Creek on concrete piers set in the creek bed. On the west side, the Art Deco auditorium (1939, James M. Spain; 300 Deer Creek Circle) of Arcola’s former white public school (a private school since 1965) has pilasters framing the entrance.
At Sligo Plantation, a mile north of the Wilmot rail stop, a stuccoed Spanish Colonial Revival house (1936) with a second-story loggia was the home of Leland physician E. J. Hoskins and his wife, Flora. Behind, the Hoskins built a gambrel-roofed dairy barn with attached silos ( pictured above) as the center of the Sligo Dairy, an early and rare dairy operation in the Delta.