[5] This area was developed by European American planters for extensive cotton plantations, dependent on enslaved laborers.

After the Civil War and emancipation, some freedmen managed to clear and buy land in the bottomlands, with many becoming landowners before the end of the nineteenth century.

By 1910, a lengthy recession and declining economic and political conditions resulted in most blacks in the state losing their land.

The railroad brought new business to Rosedale, which had a depot and shipped cotton to northern and other markets.

[5][7] Beginning in the early twentieth century, tens of thousands of blacks left the state of Mississippi as part of the Great Migration, north by railroad to Chicago and other Midwestern industrial cities.

He traced the railway route which ran south from Friars Point to Rosedale among other stops, including Vicksburg and north to Memphis.

The marker emphasizes that a common theme of blues songs was riding on the railroad, which was seen as a metaphor for travel and escape from poverty and Jim Crow in the Delta.

Locals claim that Johnson sold his soul to the Devil at the intersection of Mississippi state highways 1 and 8, on the south end of town, and that he tells this story metaphorically in "Cross Road Blues."

[8] Johnson's deal with the Devil is mentioned as occurring in Rosedale in 1930 in an episode of the TV series Supernatural.