Cotton Row

Cotton Row is a three block district in downtown Greenwood, bounded by Front Street along the Yazoo River, Main Street, Market Street and Cotton Street, and for most of a century it was where the Delta's crop was graded and sold. Cotton offices lined Front and Market; the earliest use of the name recorded locally is an 1895 newspaper item about buildings on West Market. Inside them, graders judged the quality of each bale the way cotton has always been judged, by hand and eye under north light, and factors sold it. Two railroads reached the town around 1886 and put lines through to the riverfront, and by 1900 Greenwood had become what the National Register nomination calls the state's major cotton market, holding the trade well into the 1940s. What made it a market rather than merely a shipping point was the levees, which opened hundreds of thousands of Delta acres, and the shift to grading and selling cotton on the spot instead of consigning it to factors in Memphis and New Orleans. A sign on the Keesler Bridge over the Yazoo, put up by the Jaycees around 1940, called Greenwood the world's largest inland long staple cotton market, and every word in that is doing defensive work. The boll weevil reached Mississippi in September 1907 and had the whole state by 1915, but the Delta suffered least of anywhere, because its soil ripened a crop that could be picked before weevil numbers peaked, and state historians argue the planters made more of the damage than it deserved. The district was listed on the National Register in 1980, fifty seven buildings, and most of them still line the streets, a good many of them empty.