Catfish Capital

The Yazoo–Mississippi Delta: its catfish industry, its levees, its flat country and its music.

Belzoni, Humphreys County, Mississippi

A town of two thousand people named itself after a fish, and the acreage backed it up

Belzoni sits at the centre of Humphreys County, which sits at the centre of a flat, silt-laden rectangle of alluvial plain about two hundred miles long between the Mississippi River levee and the loess bluffs at Vicksburg. The geography is not incidental: ground flat enough to flood uniformly and clay heavy enough to hold a levee is what made a pond in a field practical.

Figures reported by the USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service placed Mississippi catfish pond area in excess of 100,000 water acres at the industry's height in the late 1990s and early 2000s, with Humphreys County consistently leading the state. By the mid-2010s the state's acreage had fallen to roughly a third of that.

Processing is the constraint that decides what the ponds can sell, and a labelling argument that reached Congress decided what the package is allowed to say.

A rectangular levee pond with hard sun on the water
Ponds are cut rectangular because a levee is cheaper in a straight line and a seine has to be pulled from one end to the other in a single haul.Photo: Pok Rie / Pexels
A quiet small-town main street lined with brick storefronts including Ken's Discount Furniture
Downtown Belzoni, Humphreys County — the county seat of the pond acreage.Photo: Downtown Belzoni · Wikimedia Commons

Ponds & Plants

A town that claims a title in writing

Belzoni in Humphreys County calls itself the Catfish Capital of the World, and the claim rests on pond acreage and processing rather than on folklore.

Supported by

Flat Country

Eight places, and the reason each of them is on the map

The Yazoo–Mississippi Delta is bounded on the west by the Mississippi and on the east by the loess bluffs, which are windblown silt and have nothing to do with the river. Between the two, every place on this map does one job in the subject: Greenville is where the levee failed in 1927, Belzoni is the county seat of the pond acreage, Dockery is a plantation with a documented roster of players, and Vicksburg is where the flat stops.

The name is geologically wrong — the plain, the soil and the bluffs.

TunicaTunicaClarksdaleClarksdaleDockery FarmsDockery FarmsGreenvilleGreenvilleIndianolaIndianolaLelandLelandBelzoniBelzoniVicksburgVicksburg
The plain between the Mississippi and the Yazoo. Each pin opens the page it belongs to.

Three arguments this plain keeps having with itself

Also supported by

Rail track running straight to a low horizon, grey light

Between 1916 and 1970 about six million people left the American South. The Illinois Central ran straight north out of this plain, which is why the destination cities are the ones it served.

Shares and Trains — the tenancy, the machine and the lines north Photo: Anna Chip / Pexels

Five sections, twenty-two pages

How the subject divides

01 The crop the town is named for Levee ponds, feed, plants and a labelling fight. Ponds & Plants · 5 pages 02 The flood that changed federal policy 1927, the levees, and the Corps. The 1927 Water · 4 pages 03 A plain, not a delta Alluvium, loess bluffs, and the rivers that made it. Flat Country · 4 pages 04 Where the music was actually played Plantations, players, and the trail markers. Off Dockery · 5 pages 05 Shares and trains Sharecropping, the Great Migration, and the lines north. Shares and Trains · 4 pages All Every page, in one list The complete roster, grouped by section. Archive · 22 pages