Robert E. Lee Wilson

[1] Acquiring much of his father's former swamplands, Wilson formed a logging and farming business that would become one of the largest and most successful in the United States.

Robert's father died without a proper will, so his heirs fought over estate after Josiah Wilson's death in 1870.

Wilson went to court in 1878 to declare himself "emancipated" at the age of 17 so as to be able to lay a proper legal claim to a part of his father's estate.

He employed the sharecropping system to operate thousands of acres of land in Mississippi County.

[4] A proponent of President Roosevelt's Agricultural Adjustment Administration, Wilson used his political connections to secure federal help for his cotton business during the Great Depression.