USA - Southern States - Road Trip in the American South

VW van parked opposite redundant farm buildings near 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. Hopson was the first plantation to convert completely to the mechanical cotton pickers. Soon afterward, the sharecropper shacks where the plantation's workers had lived were abandoned and then torn down. But now they're back at the Shack Up Inn, Mississippi's oldest B&B -- and that's bed and beer, y'all. "We don't fool around with any fixing of breakfasts," said Bill Talbot, part owner of the inn.

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VW van parked opposite redundant farm buildings near 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. Hopson was the first plantation to convert completely to the mechanical cotton pickers. Soon afterward, the sharecropper shacks where the plantation's workers had lived were abandoned and then torn down. But now they're back at the Shack Up Inn, Mississippi's oldest B&B -- and that's bed and beer, y'all. "We don't fool around with any fixing of breakfasts," said Bill Talbot, part owner of the inn.