Washington County, located on the Mississippi River in the heart

of the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, is the culture that cotton built.

Founded by hearty pioneers willing to risk even their lives for the

unexcelled wealth that the white gold of cotton promised, the county

was literally carved out of a swampy, cane-covered wilderness where

the brave were as likely to reap an early grave as elaborate grandeur.

This collection of more than two hundred photographs from the

late nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth depicts the unique

and pervasive dichotomies that the struggle to weave the Cotton

Kingdom produced, especially the twin threads of prosperity and

poverty. Here men struck it rich in an unprecedented short time,

but here they lost it just as quickly. While high cotton bought white

men opulent homes and the leisure to produce literary classics,

simultaneously it bought the black man little more than a shotgun

shack and the pain that birthed the blues. Witness the challenges

presented to the mule by the machine and to the isolation of the

county’s way of life by international war and the infusion of industry.

Despite the divisions, this collection also illustrates the common,

commendable effort by the citizens of one American county in the

South to clear their land, cultivate their fields, build their homes, pave

their streets, construct their highways, lay their railroads, and protect it

all from flood, fever, and fire with an unfaltering faith in the future.