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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.
