Mississippi Chemical Corporation

A fertilizer plant owned by its customers had to be paid for in pieces. Owen Cooper of the Farm Bureau persuaded farmers and their bankers to buy $4.25 million in stock, but banks would not lend the last $3.4 million, so in January 1950 he went to Washington and secured a federal loan. The first bags came off the line on March 16, 1951. Cooper later spoke against the mob at Ole Miss in 1962, helped found Mississippi Action for Progress with Aaron Henry, and is credited with a calm school desegregation in Yazoo City in January 1970.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Triangle Cultural Center — 3.3 mi
  A 1904 school on Main Street in Yazoo City that survived the great fire of that May and now holds the county's historical museum, in a town rebuilt in brick on the same lots.
• Blue Front Cafe — 17 mi
  A cinder-block juke joint in Bentonia, opened in 1948 by Carey and Mary Holmes, home of the Bentonia school of blues and a stop on the Mississippi Blues Trail.
• Delta National Forest — 25 mi
  The only bottomland hardwood forest in the national forest system, some 60,000 acres of oak, ash and cypress in Sharkey County, run with the state as Sunflower Wildlife Management Area.

More markers nearby

• Gatemouth Moore — 2.6 mi
• Yazoo Expedition — 3.1 mi
• B.S. Ricks Memorial Library — 3.3 mi
• St. Francis Mission School — 3.3 mi