[1] Planters developed large cotton plantations along the waterways, and used enslaved African Americans in gangs to work and process this commodity crop.

After the American Civil War, many freedmen initially stayed in the area, working the land as sharecroppers or tenant farmers.

In the period after Reconstruction and into the early 20th century, whites in Lauderdale County committed eight lynchings of Black people.

[3] In 1861, the Confederate States Army built extensive defensive fortifications in Lauderdale County along the Mississippi River and named the site for General Gideon J. Pillow.

In 1864, Confederates attacked and overran the fort's Union defenders, who were about evenly split between white and black soldiers.

After the Union Army established the United States Colored Troops (USCT), made up of numerous recruits who were escaped slaves, Southern military officials vowed to kill them rather than take them prisoner.

[4] People in the North considered this event to be a massacre, and blacks in the Union Army used the cry, "Remember Fort Pillow!"

[1] Lauderdale County is situated on the southeastern edge of the New Madrid Seismic Zone, an area with a high earthquake risk.

[18] The Veterans' Museum on the grounds of the former Dyersburg Army Air Base in Halls is dedicated to the preservation and documentation of materials related to military activities from World War I to the present day wars and conflicts, as well as documenting the history of the air base itself.