Clarksdale group gets grant for arts center

The Associated Press

CLARKSDALE — James Butler believes Clarksdale, now an island of shops in a sea of farmland, will someday become a mini-destination for tourists from around the world.

The draw, he says, will be the Delta city's rich ties to music and the land and a multicultural arts center and museum to showcase it.

Clarksdale is known as the birthplace of the blues, and music fans make pilgrimages to the city for the annual Sunflower River Blues & Gospel Festival and to visit the Delta Blues Museum.

There also are other attractions, including the Shack-Up Inn, a row of sharecropper homes on the sprawling Hopson Plantation.

Butler and two of his partners hope to build on that, and they already have a $400,000 grant from the Mississippi Arts Commission.

He said many people forget Clarksdale earned a place in history when the cotton picker was invented at Hopson in 1944.

That year, Hopson became the first plantation in the world to plant and harvest a crop by machine, Butler said of the 4,000-acre site his wife's family has owned since 1852.

Before then, sharecroppers worked the land from daybreak to dark through the growing and harvesting seasons. Often, their reward was the right to live in a shotgun house and money to buy the basics of life from the plantation store.

This was the lifestyle Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson and others sang about.

"There's a large number of people interested in the blues. Then you have a lot who are interested in agriculture. We tell them the story of how these two can't be separated," Butler said.

The nonprofit group Butler formed with his cousin, Nashville songwriter Tommy Polk, and a third partner, Bill Talbot, will use the grant to transform a 20,000-square-foot seed house on the plantation into a cultural arts center.

Plans for the agricultural museum in the plantation's tractor shop will be part of a second phase of the Hopson project, Butler said.

The nonprofit P.O.R.C.H., which stands for Preservation of Rural Cultural Heritage, has three years to raise $252,000 in matching funds. Butler, P.O.R.C.H.'s president and chairman, said response has been positive.

"We had a lady from London who just passed through and gave us a check for $14,000," Butler said.

One fund-raiser is scheduled for Sept. 28, when Hopson celebrates its 150th anniversary with a seven-band outdoor concert, Butler said.

P.O.R.C.H. members also have been discussing possible events at the arts center with Delta State University and the Center for the Study of Southern Culture.

"We want to have different things going on all the time — from artists, to sculptors to musicians," Butler said.

An agricultural museum and arts center would help diversify the tourism industry in the Delta, said Mary Beth Wilkerson, sales and marketing manager for the Mississippi Development Authority's division of tourism.

"It has a tremendous amount of interest from the international market," Wilkerson said. "Their interest is not only in the agricultural side of it, but also the musical side, and how they coincide."

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