New Settlement in the Mississippi Delta

Excerpts from the report: Within the last 10 years thousands of new settlers have taken up small tracts of land in the undeveloped cut over areas of the Mississippi Delta—the poorly drained wooded lowlands of Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Missouri. Here the settlers, most of them cotton farmers from the worn-out hill lands nearby or from the sharecropper cabins of Delta plantations, are clearing the new ground and trying to establish family-size cotton farms. Hungry for land, and lacking opportunities elsewhere, they believe the undeveloped Delta areas offer the opportunities and the fresh start they are seeking. This publication seeks to call attention to the many serious problems, as well as opportunities, that face present and future settlers in the undeveloped cut-over parts of the Mississippi River Delta. Most of the information given here has been taken from recent studies of settlement conditions in the delta of northeastern Louisiana, but some of the conditions disclosed are common to many of the cut-over areas throughout the lower Mississippi River Valley. A digest of the information obtained by these studies is furnished here in nontechnical form. New settlers who have already located in the Delta cut-over areas may find this helpful when studying their present problems and arriving at solutions for them. Farmers who are thinking about moving into these areas should find the publication a useful source of facts and guidance.