page_title: Mississippi Delta
section_title: Transportation
hierarchical_section_title: Mississippi Delta / Transportation
caption_attribution_description: English: US 49 in the Mississippi Delta
context_page_description: The Mississippi Delta, also known as the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, is the distinctive northwest section of the U.S. state of Mississippi which lies between the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers. The region has been called "The Most Southern Place on Earth", because of its unique racial, cultural, and economic history. It is 200 miles long and 87 miles across at its widest point, encompassing about 4,415,000 acres, or, almost 7,000 square miles of alluvial floodplain. Originally covered in hardwood forest across the bottomlands, it was developed as one of the richest cotton-growing areas in the nation before the American Civil War. The region attracted many speculators who developed land along the riverfronts for cotton plantations; they became wealthy planters dependent on the labor of black slaves, who comprised the vast majority of the population in these counties well before the Civil War, often twice the number of whites.
  As the riverfront areas were developed first and railroads were slow to be constructed, most of the bottomlands in the Delta were undeveloped, even after the Civil War.
context_section_description: Air transportation
  Tunica Municipal Airport (Tunica)
  Mid Delta Regional Airport (Greenville)
  Greenwood-Leflore Airport (Greenwood)
  Cleveland Municipal Airport (Cleveland)
  Indianola Municipal Airport (Indianola)
  Yazoo County Airport (Yazoo City)
  Fletcher Field Airport (Clarksdale)
  Ruleville-Drew Airport (Drew and Ruleville)
  Highways
  U.S. Route 82 runs from Alamogordo, New Mexico to Brunswick, Georgia
  U.S. Route 49 runs from Piggott, Arkansas to Gulfport, Mississippi
  U.S. Route 61 runs from Wyoming, Minnesota to New Orleans, Louisiana
  Passenger rail
  Amtrak's City of New Orleans route serves three Delta cities, Yazoo City, Greenwood, and Marks.
caption: US 49 runs through the Mississippi Delta.
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