Clarksdale

Clarksdale is named for John Clark, a Coahoma County resident and brother-in-law of James L. Alcorn. The county around it had been three-quarters enslaved in 1860, and after the war Black families flooded in for land. The land mostly slipped away: the average farm fell from 357 acres in 1880 to 48 by 1900, and only 235 of 3,797 Black farming households owned theirs. Timber mills added wages and immigrants from Russia, China, Germany, Italy, Syria, Palestine and Poland, mostly men. Muddy Waters grew up in this county.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Delta Blues Museum — 0.3 mi
  The state's oldest music museum, in a restored 1918 freight depot in Clarksdale, with Muddy Waters's rebuilt cabin and instruments from Delta players.
• Parchman Farm (Mississippi State Penitentiary) — 18 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.
• Emmett Till Interpretive Center and the Tallahatchie County Courthouse — 20 mi
  The 1955 courthouse in Sumner where Emmett Till's killers were acquitted, restored to that year, and the interpretive center across the street that opened after the county's 2007 apology.
• Freedom Park — 21 mi
  An outdoor Delta Cultural Center site on the ground of a Civil War contraband camp, where thousands of people who had escaped slavery sheltered and men enlisted.

More markers nearby

• WROX — steps away
• Ike Turner — 0.2 mi
• Wade Walton — 0.3 mi
• Big Jack Johnson — 0.4 mi