Named after John Clark, who settled along the Sunflower River in 1859, Clarksdale incorporated in 1882. The town grew into a shipping center for the northern Delta after the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad (Y&MV) arrived in 1884. The railroad also created a dividing line between white neighborhoods to the north and black neighborhoods to the south. Like most Delta towns, Clarksdale boomed in the early twentieth century as cotton prices rose and related industries opened along the railroad. Population grew from less than 1,000 in 1890 to around 10,000 in 1920. Architects who helped design Clarksdale’s boom-time buildings included Frank P. Gates, who later moved to Jackson, M. M. Alsop, who moved to Memphis in 1919, and Clarksdale native Francis M. Skewes, who practiced into the 1970s.
In blues mythology, Clarksdale became known as “The Crossroads” for the crossing of highways U.S. 61 and U.S. 49, where blues musician Robert Johnson said he sold his soul to the Devil to become the best guitar player ever. In the 1990s, Clarksdale used this image to establish itself as the center of Delta blues tourism. The small city also played an outsized role in civil rights history as the home of pharmacist Aaron Henry, president of the Mississippi NAACP from 1960 to 1993, who, among other things, led a boycott of downtown businesses beginning in 1963 to protest persistent discrimination against African Americans. Henry’s pharmacy at 213 Martin Luther King Boulevard and his house at 636 Page Street were lost to fire in the 1990s.
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