For photos of Delta towns, please click here.

We drove through the Mississippi Delta, the very flat northwestern floodplain of Mississippi (and a small part of Arkansas) between the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers.

Holly Springs, north of Oxford, is similar to many Delta towns, having a central square with a courthouse surrounded by storefronts. Oxford (see dedicated Oxford page), too, has this configuration, but it has been able to thrive while most other towns have fallen into decay. Once county seats and central locations for trade, these towns are now mostly obsolescent. Land has been consolidated into large farms, and sharecroppers were replaced by large agricultural machinery.

Nine miles south of Oxford is Taylor, population 312, with the renowned Taylor Grocery Restaurant (our son tells us that it is a “foodie” destination), which serves excellent catfish. Each night the restaurant hosts blues music, though the group hadn’t arrived by the time we had dinner. Next door to the Grocery is William Beckwith’s sculpture studio. Beckwith is a renowned artist and teacher, with monuments around the country; we noted two of his works in Oxford.

Helena-West Helena, Arkansas is also depressed. Main Street Helena is an organization trying to redevelop the downtown, so far with what looked like little success. We visited Helena’s Civil War battleground, Confederate Cemetery, and a newer Jewish Cemetery.

Friars Point, Mississippi has little besides a small grocery run by a Chinese family. A young woman, who moved from Hong Kong a year ago (she described it as a long year) to join her family, does the bookkeeping. The family has a garden in the rear and serves take-out Chinese food.

Photos and text for Clarksdale, Coahoma County seat, are on a dedicated page.

Glendora, Mississippi is the home of the Emmett Till Historic Intrepid Center (ETHIC). Interpretive signs around the town mark some of the incidents in Till’s 1955 brutal lynching, allegedly for his whistling at a white woman (she later recanted her story). The murderers were acquitted, but years later admitted to the crime. The museum (it was closed when we arrived, though we were there during posted operating hours) is in the old cotton gin, from which the fan was taken to tie onto Till, and then his 14-year-old body was thrown into the river.

Greenville, once the center of Delta culture, is now somewhat diminished in importance, though was the home of many writers and artists, including Walker Percy, Hodding Carter, David Cohn, and Shelby Foote. The public library has a display and documents about the many writers who called Greenville home. We spoke with Marilyn Busby, library docent, about the city and its writers. David Cohn wrote: “Greenville not only reads books, but with the capacity for the excessive that seems to flow from its rich earth, is feverishly writing them. It shelters so many practicing and aspiring writers that sober citizens wonder who will do the useful work of the community such as baking bread and repairing cars.”

On the outskirts of Greenville are the Winterville Indian Mounds and Museum. This is one of the largest mound sites in the U.S. Archaeologists suggest that temples and homes used to stand atop the mounds, and that Winterville served as a ceremonial center for the people who inhabited the region from about 1100 to 1350 AD.

Grand Gulf, south of Vicksburg (link to Vicksburg page), and along the Mississippi River, is now site of a military historical park (two Civil War battles with ironclad ships were fought here, due to its strategic siting) as well as a modern nuclear power station. Grand Gulf suffered a huge flood in 2011; because of ample warning about the waters coursing down the river, the staff was able to save most of the papers and artifacts from the museum.

Continuing south, we drove through Port Gibson, a small and poor city with just over 1,500 people. In 1892, the once thriving Jewish population built a synagogue, Gemiluth Chessed, in the Moorish Revival style. The congregation disbanded in 1986, but the building is now used by a Messianic congregation. Just outside of Port Gibson and near Alcorn State University in Lorman are the ruins of the Windsor mansion. Built between 1859 and 1861, the three-story structure survived the Civil War and Reconstruction only to succumb to a fire in 1890. What remains are its tall columns, a ghostly reminder of its past. The mansion’s grand iron stairway was moved to Oakland Memorial Chapel at Alcorn State University.

Just outside the gates of Alcorn State University, an historically black land-grant college, is Patton’s Grocery, where they’ve been serving shrimp, catfish, and much more since 1880.

Our journey south through Mississippi took us to Jefferson Military College in Washington, just north of Natchez (link to Natchez page). Named in honor of Thomas Jefferson, the college opened in 1811, later became a preparatory school for boys, and is now a museum.

After leaving Natchez, we stopped in Woodville, near the border with Louisiana. Similar to Delta towns, Woodville, now with only about 1,000 people, has a courthouse in the center of its square.

Recommended reading:

Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippis Delta by Richard Grant