Chrisman Street

The crowds on Chrisman Street came from a county built on tenancy. By 1900 Bolivar County had more than thirty-five thousand people, over thirty-one thousand of them Black, yet only 12 percent of Black farmers owned their land, compared with 44 percent of white farmers. The average farm had shrunk from 311 acres in 1880 to 44 as owners divided land among tenants and sharecroppers. Mound Bayou, founded in 1887 by Isaiah and Joshua Montgomery and Benjamin Green, offered another model, with Black mayors, banks, businesses and a hospital.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Dockery Farms — 5.9 mi
  The plantation on the Sunflower River where Charley Patton lived and played from about 1900, now a working farm, a National Register district and a Mississippi Blues Trail stop.
• Mound Bayou — 9.5 mi
  The Bolivar County town founded in 1887 by men who had been enslaved at Davis Bend, built to be Black-owned, home of Taborian Hospital and a museum on Roosevelt Street.
• Fannie Lou Hamer Memorial Garden — 10 mi
  The small park on Byron Street in Ruleville where Fannie Lou Hamer is buried beside her husband, with a Freedom Trail marker and a 2012 bronze statue.
• Parchman Farm (Mississippi State Penitentiary) — 16 mi
  The state penitentiary on Sunflower County cotton land, built in 1900 as a prison plantation, where Freedom Riders were held in 1961; a working prison with no visits and a Blues Trail marker at its gate.

More markers nearby

• Gospel and the Blues — 0.2 mi
• The Enlightenment of W.C. Handy — 0.3 mi
• Cleveland — 0.3 mi
• Adath Israel Temple — 0.4 mi