Delta sites to be included on new blues trail", "Mississippi Blues Commission Blues Trail", "CORONAVIRUS Justice Department defends Mississippi drive-in church service", "Greenville Mayor Quits and Hunt is Successor", "Magruder At Banquet - Retired Admiral Will Speak At Greenville", "City, County Officials take Office Monday", "Former Police Chief Wins Demo Nomination for Greenville Mayor", "Incumbent Greenville Mayor Loses Runoff Election", "Democrat Hudson Makes History, Is Elected Greenville Mayor", "New Greenville Mayor Jordan Takes Office Jan. 3 - Jordan Defeated McGee In Monday's Election", "Greenville mayor resigns following cancer diagnosis", "A Culture in Decline: The Mississippi Delta Chinese", School District Reference Map (2010 Cenus): Washington County, MS, "St. Joseph Catholic School, Greenville, Mississippi", Our Lady of Lourdes Elementary School website, "Band director with HBCU roots making history at LSU", "Holt Collier: Guiding Roosevelt through the Mississippi [Canebrake]. It had the business and cultural center for the large cotton plantations surrounding it. Ravaged by epidemics of smallpox and malaria and infections such as typhoid fever, measles, syphilis, and tuberculosis, the Mississippian population plummeted (Thomas, Josephy, and Miller 1993). Nearly two decades later federal Indian policy briefly reversed course and once again endorsed assimilation, as Congress in 1953 implemented a "termination" policy to end tribal autonomy and offered subsidies to those Indian families that left the reservations and relocated in cites. Their status, however, changed in 1641 when the Massachusetts colony sanctioned the enslavement of African laborers. The land allotted the Indians, however, was often the least fertile and their unfamiliarity with the legal concept of holding land in severalty, possessing individual allotments of land in fee simple title, left many vulnerable to the chicanery of land hungry settlers. Yet no contemporary historian has assumed the daunting task of researching and writing a historical synthesis of this region. Mississippian society entered a positive feedback cycle. At the same time, as economic and social controls became more concentrated, larger agricultural surpluses were needed to support the infrastructure. The wife of a sharecropper from Marked Tree wrote: We Garded our House and been on the scout untill we are Ware out, and Havenent any law to looks to, thay and the Land Lords hast all turned to nite Ridingthay shat up some House and have Threten our Union and Wont let us Meet at the Hall at all (Leuchtenburg 1963). The county is named in honor of the first president of the United States, George Washington.It is located to the Arkansas border. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 0.71% of the population. Under the New Deal, Federal policy makers earmarked the South as the nations number one economic problem area; however, Federal work relief programs were of more benefit to unemployed whites than African-Americans. The Irish came to the Delta in the 1830s and were often considered more expendable than slaves. On Washington Avenue, Saffort Library houses a treasure of Civil War documents. Genevieve, and Cape Girardeau, as well as in Baton Rouge, New Orleans, and Acadian Louisiana. All About Greenville, South Carolina | VisitGreenvilleSC The decree expanded the war aims from preservation of the Union to include the abolition of slavery. The deadly fever paralyzed the business, and not a single-family escaped the tragedy. The descriptions and analysis contained in the tables in the appendix form a database of information to guide those interested in developing heritage tourism initiatives in the Delta. Byron De La Beckwith, who assassinated civil rights leader Medger Evers in Jackson, Mississippi in June, 1963 was a member of both the KKK and a White Citizens Council (Stewart 1996; Carson; 1991; Trelease 1991). "King Cotton" came to dominate the southern economy, as cotton production rose from approximately 13,000 bales in 1792 to more than 5 million bales by 1860. Responding to Farraguts demand for surrender, Confederate Lt. Col. James L. Autrey, the post commander at Vicksburg, answered, "Mississippians dont know, and refuse to learn, how to surrender to an enemy." In August of 1877, yellow fever broke out in Greenville. 5 Best Things to Do in Greenville, Mississippi - Trips To Discover Greenville is a city in Washington County, Mississippi, United States. A unified Confederate force was not seen in Missouri again until late 1864 when Sterling Price failed in a desperate attempt to regain control of the state. The river is still the most significant, inspiring feature of the Lower Mississippi Delta region. Starting with members of Hernando de Sotos 1541 expedition, accounts of gold and glory, of death and disease provide a record of a river that now exists only in memory. From May 23 to July 9, 1863, Confederate soldiers held off a Union force twice its strength during the longest siege in American military history. A key element of this Union success was the use of a powerful new weapon: black soldiers. Few groups of people have had more impact on the cultural heritage of the lower Mississippi River delta than its African-American citizens. Sharecropping was a system of social and racial control used by post-Civil War plantation owners (often merchants, bankers, and industrialists). The social stratum occupied by Creoles of color was unique to Louisiana. Two weeks later, black troops successfully defended Grants supply base at Millikens Bend, Louisiana, against a determined attack by Confederate infantry. His strategy known as the "Anaconda Plan" reflected the importance of the Mississippi River in the overall strategy of the war. Understand Greenville was named after American Revolutionary War hero Nathanael Greene. Cut off from the outside world, the citizens and soldiers of Vicksburg, many of whom sought refuge in caves, withstood the constant bombardment of Union guns for 47 days. Chief among those meriting special distinction were abolitionist journalist Elijah Lovejoy; Generals Ulysses S. Grant, and John A. Logan. Other resources to utilize include Photo Galleries, Maps, Video Gallery, Facts & Figures, Weather, Maps, transportation options, and a tool to begin planning your trip! Winterville Mounds and Leroy Percy state parks are nearby. The valiant civil rights struggles are memorialized in communities throughout the delta region, such as in the county administration building of Port Gibson, Mississippi. The lower Mississippi River Delta also has a parallel and bisecting system of federally funded interstate highways used by huge trucks to transport goods throughout the region. Also culturally distinctive within the lower Mississippi Delta region is the Creole population of Louisiana. And.. . Today, Cajun cuisine and music, which has been transformed from its traditional 19th century character by the addition of the accordion, guitar, drums, and amplification (Ancelet 1991) are deeply embedded in Louisiana culture and are a unique component of the Delta regions heritage. In 1964 Fannie Lou Hamer of Ruleville, Mississippi drew national attention for her work as a civil rights organizer and her futile attempts to seat the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegates at the Democratic Partys presidential nomination convention in Atlantic City. The Delta region supplied naval stores such as timber, tar, pitch, and other raw materials to the European colonial powers. Finally, when the contents of a chamber pot were dumped from a balcony and onto the head of Admiral Farragut. The four-lane Greenville Bridge, a $206 million cable-stayed span crossing the Mississippi River into Arkansas, opened in 2010, replacing the two-lane Benjamin G. Humphreys Bridge, which opened in 1940. Though the Cherokee, and to a lesser extent the other Indians of the so-called five "civilized tribes" (the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole, and Creek), embraced many of the ways of the white America, the Indians, who were bound to the land by centuries of discovery and settlement, were soon to be ousted from their lands with the ascendancy of Andrew Jackson to the presidency in 1828 (White 1993 and Josephy 1994). The beautiful city of Greenville once had an economy built largely on textile manufacturing, and the city was even known as "Textile Capital of the World." Today, Greenville enjoys a diversified economy thanks to a pro-business attitude and tax benefits to companies, and the city is enjoying impressive economic growth. We're proud to share Greenville and Washington County with all; discover for yourself that there's more than meets the eye in this land of rich customs and folklore, creativity and physical beauty that make up one of America's most unique destinations. White Creoles were generally landed gentry, who adopted and retained European mannerisms and enjoyed a cultured and sophisticated lifestyle. It is located in downtown Greenville and presents the history of one of the greatest natural disasters this country has ever known. Visitors can learn about the events through a 12-minute documentary film, actual flood artifacts, and photographs which illustrate the flood's impact on life and death during the three months Greenville and the Mississippi Delta were inundated. Both sides realized the significance of these transportation networks and knew they must control them to win the war. Inc. town, 1870; city, 1886. List of casinos in Mississippi - Wikipedia The petrochemical industry came to the Delta region during the 1930s, as refineries sprang up along the Mississippi River, a major transportation corridor. As his soldiers were hurled back with bloody loss, his words proved prophetic. It was the northernmost slave state in the Mississippi River valley, and when its neighbor Kansas wanted to enter the Union in 1854 as a free state, trouble erupted along the border. Music and the lower Mississippi River delta are synonymous and, indeed, the Delta is the cradle of American music. At first reluctant to secede, Tennessee became one of the bloodiest killing grounds of the Civil War. The inhabitants took refuge in plantation homes of the area. By the mid-19th century, the majority of the nations cotton was raised in Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana, and nowhere in the antebellum South was the cotton economy more dominant than Natchez, Mississippi, which was "the wealthiest town per capita in the United States" on the eve of the Civil War (NPS 1995a and Hilliard 1994). The historic marker in front of the restaurant commemorates its importance in the history of the blues in Mississippi. . The citys population has decreased by almost 30% since the most recent census, which recorded a population of 34,000 in 2010. It was named by its founders for General Nathanael Greene, friend of President George Washington, for whom the county was named. One response to such political, economic, and social oppression was emigration. But the Mississippi River was never tamed, as the levees failed to deter the rivers periodic onslaughts. Greenville (Mississippi) - Wikitravel [8], Greenville is located on the eastern bank of Lake Ferguson, an oxbow lake left from an old channel of the Mississippi River. Though the date that humans first trod upon the North American continent is unknown, contemporary scientific and archeological data suggests that the earliest American Indians migrated eastward across Asia and apparently began crossing from present-day Siberia to Alaska via an ancient land bridge, sometime between 10,000 to 70,000 years ago. Inspired in part by the impulse of humanitarian reform, such as the popular writings of Helen Hunt Jackson, who depicted the injustices and cruelties inflicted upon Indians in A Century of Dishonor (1881) and Ramona (1884), but more so by the pressing need to satisfy the land hunger of Western settlers, Congress in 1887 passed the Dawes Severalty, or General Allotment, Act. Some slaves escaped and took refuge with Indians, who often welcomed the runaways as members of their communities. Outside of New Orleans, Louisiana has more than 100 Civil War related sites, ranging from the Red River campaign throughout southcentral Louisiana to Grants March in the northeastern corner of the state, to numerous skiimishes and raids across the state, to antebellum homes, museums, and trails of historic markers. Rather they represent a cross-section of the heritage resources found in this diverse and richly textured region. After burning Indian villages and hanging several Indian chiefs, Jackson took it upon himself to march on Pensacola, oust the Spanish territorial governor, and claimed the territory for the United States.