Incorporated on the banks of the Yazoo River in 1844, Greenwood became Leflore County’s seat in 1871. The town and the county took their name from Choctaw chief Greenwood Leflore, whose house Malmaison (burned 1942) once dominated the bluffs to the east. Two railroads, both completed around 1886, crossed Greenwood, and both have extant depots: the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad (c. 1918; 506 E. Carrollton Avenue) and the Columbus and Greenville (c. 1918; 140 W. Johnson Street). Billing itself the “Eastern Gateway to the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta,” the town became Mississippi’s largest cotton market in the early twentieth century and experienced its fastest growth in the 1920s. Cotton gins, cottonseed oil mills, and the Greenwood Electric Light and Water Plant (c. 1915; 101 Wright Place) settled along the railroads. The Greenwood Compress warehouses (c. 1918; 600 E. Carrollton) still consume many blocks on the east side of the Y&MV. Lining the downtown blocks (Front and Market streets and Ramcat Alley) closest to the Yazoo River, the low brick buildings of “Cotton Row” housed cotton factors’ offices where the grading, buying, and selling of the Delta’s cash crop took place well into the 1970s. Greenwood is still home to many cotton-related businesses, most importantly Staplcotn, the oldest continuously operating cotton marketing cooperative in the world. It is located in a mix of historic and new buildings at 214 W. Market Street. Since 1987, Viking Range Corporation has renovated and occupied much of Cotton Row for corporate offices. Downtown’s low-scale commercial buildings create a compact urban space, and a few, such as the Romanesque Revival McBee Building (1891; former Bank of Greenwood) at 115 Howard Street, are stylistically superior.
From the 1880s, white neighborhoods developed to the east and west of downtown, while African American neighborhoods—Henry Addition, Baptist Town, and Gritney—were south and east of the intersecting railroad tracks. In June 1966, members of the Meredith March for civil rights camped in Gritney’s Broad Street Park (Broad and Avenue M), and here Stokely Carmichael led his chant of “Black Power” for the first time.
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