Original 'Blues brother' style Dodge Monaco police car at the Shack Up Inn, Clarksdale. If you want to explore Clarksdale and the Blues country in true retro fashion the best place to do so is by staying at the Shack Up Inn. In The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America, author Nicholas Lemman describes how, on Oct. 2, 1944, a crowd of 3,000 people quietly watched the first public demonstration of the mechanical cotton picker at Hopson's plantation in Clarksdale. At best, wrote Lemman, a skilled field hand could pick 20 pounds of cotton in an hour; the mechanical picker picked 1,000 pounds. Hopson calculated that a bale of cotton (500 pounds) cost $39.41 to pick by hand and $5.26 by machine. It wasn't too hard to foresee the future.
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