The land belonged to Native Americans, followed by the French, until Emperor Napoleon sold it to the United States as a result of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803.

[3] Worthington moved his slaves and livestock to Texas from 1862 to 1865, and let his two mulatto children, including his son James W. Mason, take care of the land.

[3] Even though Worthington was pardoned by President Andrew Johnson, he decided to sell his plantation, partly due to the loss of his workforce, the dwindling price of cotton, and his worsening health.

[2] John C. Calhoun II testified before the United States Senate Committee on Education and Labor in September 1883, explaining that his goal was to empower freedmen to save and become self-sufficient tenants.

[3] The testimony was so well-received that it was published by civil rights leader Timothy Thomas Fortune in his 1884 Black and White: Land, Labor, and Politics.

[2] With the help of Emanuele Ruspoli, 1st Prince of Poggio Suasa, who served as the Mayor of Rome from 1892 to 1899, Corbin brought Italian immigrants led by Pietro Bandini[7] to work on the plantation.

[8] They lived in a house on their own twelve-and-a-half acre lots of cotton, which they were obligated to pay back over the next twenty years, with an annual rate of five percent.

[3] In December 1898, Corbin's heirs leased the plantation to Hamilton R. Hawkins, Orlando B. Crittenden, Morris Rosenstock, and Leroy Percy.

"[10] In 1907, after hearing many complaints from immigrants, Edmondo Mayor des Planches, the Italian ambassador to the United States, visited the plantation.

[9] As he explained in his 1913 report, Attraverso gli Stati Uniti per L'Emigrazione Italiana, he was unimpressed by Percy's rosy rewriting of reality.

[9] Shortly afterward, Mary Grace Quackenbos, an attorney with the US Department of Justice, visited the plantation to look into repeated reports of peonage.

[8] Prosecution was stopped in its tracks, possibly because of Percy's friendship with US President Theodore Roosevelt with whom he had hunted bears on his Smedes Plantation, in Mississippi.

[9] Sweet Hope (Guernica Editions, 2011), a historical novel by Mary Bucci Bush, tells the story of Italian immigrants working on a Mississippi Delta cotton plantation in the early 1900s.

[3] The plantation was finally broken up, as tracts of land were sold to individual buyers from 1941 to 1945, in the midst of World War II.