I have a friend who grew up the son of sharecroppers in Mississippi County. He likes to talk about the culture shock that would occur decades ago when traveling down U.S. 61, also known as the Blues Highway. After passing dozens of sharecropper shacks, motorists would enter the company town of Wilson, shaded by majestic cottonwood trees. Its downtown businesses were housed in buildings designed in the English Tudor style.
If it were a Sunday, he told me, pastures on the edge of town would be filled with polo players in elegant white uniforms atop beautiful horses. The sharecropper shacks are gone these days. So is the polo, at least for now. But Wilson remains a different place from the rest of the Delta. Gaylon Lawrence Jr., one of the nation’s largest landowners, purchased the plantation from members of the Wilson family in 2010. Since then, he has spent millions of dollars converting Wilson into a model farm town.