For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, Mississippi was an overwhelmingly agricultural state. While farming provided a route to economic success for many White Mississippians, a number of White people could always be found at the bottom of the agricultural ladder, working as tenant farmers or sharecroppers, a status more typically associated with Black Mississippians in the century after the American Civil War.
In 1929 the mayor of Columbia, Mississippi, Hugh Lawson White, gazed out his office window and contemplated the town’s future. Located in the Piney Woods region, Columbia had depended on the cutting and milling of longleaf yellow pine as the principal source of employment for its 4,000 residents. By the middle of the 1920s with the vast stands of pine “timbered out,” the largest companies packed up their machines, sold their buildings for scrap, and moved on to new, more promising locations.
In March 1933, a tall, lanky, sandy-haired man stepped off the train at the Washington, D. C. station. No one greeted him, no band played, hardly anyone knew he had arrived. William M. Colmer had come to the nation’s capital to witness the inauguration of Franklin D. Roosevelt and then to represent the people of the sixth congressional district of Mississippi in the Seventy-third Congress.
By 1932 the Great Depression had the country in its relentless grip and most Americans believed that something was very wrong.
Farm-raised catfish is the largest aquaculture industry in the United States. In 2005, the U.S. catfish industry produced 600 million pounds of catfish from 165,000 pond water acres. The farm-raised catfish industry at $450 million in annual production value has the highest economic value of any aquaculture industry in the United States. The next highest valued aquaculture industry in the country is trout, valued at $74 million in annual production.
William Faulkner, Mississippi’s most famous novelist, once said, “To understand the world, you have to understand a place like Mississippi.”
In the early 18th century the economy of France was depressed. The government was deeply in debt and taxes were high. In addition, the French controlled the colony of Louisiana, a vast settlement in the interior of North America. The Louisiana Colony included the Natchez district and the area along the Mississippi Gulf Coast in present-day Mississippi. France was the first European country to settle this area of North America (1699-1763).