Tourists in Miss. can sleep in plantation shacks

Photo: P.F. Edwards, Garden & Gun

Entrepreneurs in Clarksdale, Miss., have found a way to market rural poverty with the Shack Up Inn, a collection of authentic sharecropper shacks, Tracy Thompson writes in her book, The New Mind of the South.

In a book excerpt in the Daily Yonder, Thompson says the inn is on "the site of the old Hopson Plantation a few miles outside of town, retrofitted with some modern necessities like indoor plumbing, heat and air conditioning, and then rented to tourists traveling down Highway 61 on the Mississippi Blues Trail."

The Shack Up Inn website says that visitors can "immerse yourself in the living history you will find at Hopson. Virtually unchanged from when it was a working plantation, you will find authentic sharecropper shacks, the original cotton gin and seed houses and other outbuildings. You will glimpse plantation life, as it existed only a few short years ago. In addition, you will find one of the first mechanized cotton pickers."

The inn is a hit with the musical and literary set, but there have been few African American visitors, writes Thompson. More than 40 percent of Clarksdale residents lived below the poverty level in 2007-11, according to a U.S. Census Bureau report. The population is 79 percent black.