Sharkey County Courthouse

The courthouse serves one of the most unequal counties in the Delta. When Sharkey County was cut from three others in 1876, its first census in 1880 counted 4,893 Black residents, 77 percent of the population, and the average farm covered 540 acres, among the largest in the state. By 1900 the county held 12,178 people, 88 percent of them Black, and farms averaged only fifty-five acres as tenancy and sharecropping spread. Just 73 of 1,821 Black farmers owned their land, against 90 of 222 white farmers. The 1880 census recorded no manufacturing at all.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Delta National Forest — 11 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.
• Grant's Canal, Lake Providence — 19 mi
  About 1,000 feet of the ditch Union troops dug in early 1863 to get Grant's army around Vicksburg, with a boardwalk, a pier and a visitor center in the Byerley House.
• Louisiana State Cotton Museum — 20 mi
  A state museum on US 65 north of Lake Providence with a sharecropper's cabin, a commissary and a gin house, in the parish where John H. Scott worked for Black voting rights.
• Lakeport Plantation — 29 mi
  Arkansas's grandest surviving Greek Revival plantation house, built about 1858 by a planter who held 155 enslaved people in 1860, now an Arkansas State University museum.

More markers nearby

• Hampton Plantation — 11 mi
• Hill's Plantation — 13 mi
• Sam Chatmon — 18 mi
• Grant's March Through Louisiana — 19 mi