Baptist Town

Baptist Town is one of Greenwood's oldest Black neighbourhoods, settled in the closing decades of the nineteenth century by people working the plantations, gins and mills as the cotton business pulled labour into the town. Residents hold that it was among the first places in the Delta where freed families could buy and own property, a tradition the neighbourhood has carried for generations, though no deed research has been published to settle it either way. It sits east of downtown, cut off from it by the railroad tracks and a bayou, and it is anchored by McKinney Chapel Missionary Baptist Church and by a cotton compress that no longer presses anything. For a few blocks of small houses it has been photographed, filmed and studied a great deal. Robert Johnson lived on Young Street in the summer of 1938, as did David Honeyboy Edwards, who is the source for Baptist Town being Johnson's last address. He was taken ill playing at a juke joint, by most accounts the one at Three Forks where Highways 82 and 49E meet outside town, though some accounts put it in Baptist Town itself, and he died days later at the Star of the West plantation a few miles north. That association is why visitors come, and it is a thin reason to come. Between 2013 and 2015 a reinvestment project led by the Delta Design Build Workshop with Mississippi State's Carl Small Town Center and the Fuller Center built eleven new houses here, rehabilitated fourteen more, and added a community centre, a playground and sidewalks.