Dockery Plantation, Cotton plantation and musical site in Sunflower County, United States.
Dockery Plantation is a cotton plantation in Sunflower County, United States, stretching along the Sunflower River between the towns of Ruleville and Cleveland in Mississippi. The site includes agricultural fields and several preserved wooden buildings from around 1900, including a commissary and workers' housing.
Will Dockery purchased the land in 1895 and built a plantation that grew into a self-contained settlement with its own store, school, and church. During the first decades of the 20th century, many workers and their families moved here, and some of them developed a new form of music now known as Delta Blues.
The name Dockery comes from Will Dockery, who founded the plantation in 1895; his descendants later set up a foundation funding research into the Delta blues. Workers' quarters included boardinghouses where residents socialized and played guitars, accordions, banjos, mandolins and harmonicas. A Mississippi Blues Trail marker placed in Cleveland quotes Governor Haley Barbour on the plantation's role in the blues.
The site is located on MS-8 between Ruleville and Cleveland and is accessible through guided tours that should be booked in advance. Pathways lead across flat terrain, and some buildings can only be viewed from the outside.
Workers were paid in the plantation's own coins, and the settlement had its own post office, school, doctor and churches. A Mississippi Blues Trail marker for Dockery stands not on the farm but in Cleveland, Mississippi, where Governor Haley Barbour dedicated it.
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