Delta Empire: Lee Wilson and the Transformation of Agriculture in the New South

Abstract

Which was the biggest cotton plantation of them all? The Delta Pine and Land Company of Mississippi may have been more famous, but Robert E. “Lee” Wilson's empire in Mississippi County, Arkansas, actually had greater acreage as of the 1920s, as one learns in this wide-ranging plantation biography by Jeannie Whayne, a professor of history at the University of Arkansas. Whayne has previously written on Arkansas agriculture (A New Plantation South, 1996) and explains that she had abandoned plans to study the Wilson plantation because, seemingly, no company records survived. The chance discovery by repairmen in the 1990s of a false wall and a room full of records and correspondence induced Whayne to reconsider. The project was suggested by Mike Wilson, a descendant of the founder and then head of the company, but the independence of Whayne's perspective is evident throughout. As with conventional biographies, the mode imposes certain constraints on the narrative, so that the book does not offer a definitive treatment of any one historical event or development. The powerful personality and drive of Robert Wilson dominate the first seven chapters, conveying a vivid sense of his roots as the son of a pioneering but middling (four hundred–acre) planter, family hardships, and relentless land acquisitions, timbering, and swamp drainage activities that paid off handsomely. But it is often difficult to determine whether the Wilson plantation stands as an archetype for emerging trends in southern business and technology or as the great exception to prevailing norms. For example, in 1935 Wilson was accused by the Southern Tenant Farmers Union of changing from a sharecropping to a day-labor system, throwing hundreds of families on relief. But the available records do not allow Whayne to determine the truth of the accusation (pp. 204–5).