Hopson Plantation Established 1852

International Harvester used the Hopson Plantation as a test station for its mechanical cotton picker from 1935. At the public demonstration on 2 October 1944, with about three hundred onlookers, the machine harvested six acres a day, more than a skilled hand. The family worked out the saving itself: about $39 a bale by hand, about $5 by machine. The Great Migration had already thinned the plantation's labor, and the picker hastened the end of sharecropping. By 1950 production was fully mechanized, and the farm ran commercially until 1972 before reopening as lodging and a music venue.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Delta Blues Museum — 3.3 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) — 15 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 — 16 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.
• Mound Bayou — 22 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.

More markers nearby

• Crossroads of 49 & 61 — 2.7 mi
• Riverside Hotel — 2.9 mi
• Big Jack Johnson — 3.1 mi
• Wade Walton — 3.3 mi