Delta Region

By 1832, the Choctaw and Chickasaw tribes had ceded their land in Mississippi’s northwest quadrant to the federal government, but their ancestors had left their mark with hundreds of mounds that rise above the flat alluvial land. Mythologized today in popular culture as a place that time forgot, a never-changing island within the shifting American landscape, the Delta is in fact Mississippi’s most dramatically altered region since American settlement in the 1840s. With some of the richest and deepest topsoil in the world, laid down by millennia of seasonal floods, the Delta—more correctly referred to as the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta—was ideal for cotton plantations, worked by slaves, before the Civil War. Plantations grew even larger in the late nineteenth century after northern timber barons cleared the Delta’s hardwood forests and railroads allowed agriculture on an industrial scale. As James Cobb notes in The Most Southern Place on Earth (1994), the most successful and powerful Delta planters used consolidation strategies more closely associated with northern commercial interests to transform the landscape into a highly efficient agricultural enterprise. By the 1930s, the U.S. Department of Agriculture noted that the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta had become “one of the most highly specialized cotton-producing areas in the world.” To bring this about, planters relied on a system of sharecropping and tenancy that employed mostly African American workers. Consequently, African Americans have composed a majority (about 75 percent) of the population for most of the Delta’s history.

Beginning with Euro-American settlement, planters built earthen levees to control flooding of their plantations, and later they governed the Board of Mississippi Levee Commissioners (DR15). The levee system helped control, though not eliminate, frequent “high-water” events until the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 inundated most of the Delta, devastating communities and an entire season of crops. After the catastrophe, the federal government placed the levee system under the management of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Agricultural mechanization beginning in the 1940s made field hands redundant, and depopulation in the region began. Novelist, historian, and Greenville native Shelby Foote noted the changes in a 1969 letter to his friend Reynolds Price: “All tenant houses gone, all woods, all Old South, all gone. Weird feeling of having been there before, except not really. The air was full of efficiency and money.” Today, land consolidation has reached its natural extreme, and vast expanses of cotton, corn, soybeans, rice, and catfish ponds take the place of the many rural plantation and railroad communities that once peopled the Delta.