Crockett County, Tennessee History — Cotton, Railroads, and Farm Life After 1871

Crockett County's fertile, largely hill-free land in the Mississippi River drainage basin made it productive farm country from the moment it was carved out of Dyer, Gibson, Haywood, and Madison counties in 1871. This page covers that agricultural and economic story, distinct from the county's formation history covered on this archive's main Crockett County hub.

Cotton was the county's dominant cash crop through the nineteenth century, though farmers also grew wheat, corn, and other small grains alongside raising livestock. By the 1880s, county agricultural output was substantial and varied: corn, wheat, cotton, sweet and Irish potatoes, grasses, fruit, and strawberries all contributed to the local economy. Strawberry shipments alone brought in more than eighty thousand dollars in 1885, and the county produced roughly eight hundred bales of cotton that same year, rising toward nine hundred the following year.

Railroads arrived earlier than the county itself. The Memphis, Clarksville and Louisville Railroad built a line through the eastern half of what later became Crockett County in 1858–1859, well before the county's 1871 formation. Once the county was organized, that existing rail line proved essential to its farm economy, generating the traffic that encouraged cotton gins to spring up in towns along the route and providing the shipping capacity that carried the county's fruit crop to market.