"The death of Mr. Joe Davis and taking over of his properties by his heirs lost us our holdings and I became interested in the Yazoo Delta. I heard that the Y. & M. V. was asking colored people to come in and open up the country and after going over the situation I decided to select Mound Bayou for the seat of my future operations. This place was selected because between Big and Little Mound bayous there was an old Indian mound. This was in 1887 and it certainly was a wild territory, it had rich land but it was thickly grown over with oak and ash and gum, and acres and acres of cane. Well, I plundered around here and induced other colored folks to settle there. I founded Mound Bayou Settlement--the railroad folks wanted to name it Montgomery, a few years ago but I made the original name stick. "Building up our community was slow work. All the colored folks bought their places on 10-year contracts and it was hard work for some of them in the face of a few crop failures, overflows, boll weevil and other set-backs but we succeeded. Mound Bayou Settlement is now a town of a little over 1,000 population and there are about 2,500 in the country nearby. The town is of wholly colored population and we have three big churches, one costing $25,000, another costing $15,000 and another $10,000. There are several other less pretentious places of worship, as well. "We have two big mercantile establishments. The largest being the one I founded and known as the Mercantile Co-operative Company which now has a $20,000 stock. We also have the Mound Bayou State Bank, with $10,000 capital, a $3,000 surplus, with resources between $150,000 and $200,000. I am a member of the board of directors and we make a great many loans to our colored people to see they get out their crops, and being in the staple cotton belt, we make most of it on this crop. "We have just completed a consolidated school house, 95 feet square, three stories high, with 16 large class rooms. It cost us $100,000 which was raised by a local bond issue. We have a seven to eight months' term and employ an agricultural expert, co-operating under the Smith-Lever national fund and a very fine domestic science class. "The town has a mayor and a board of aldermen, all office holders being colored folks, and the present mayor, B. H. Green, was the first man born in the settlement. I was mayor for over four years, being the first to hold the office, resigning it to hold the office of receiver of public monies at Jackson, Miss. "We have four gins that can handle over 5,000 bales and our people now feel that the upward trend of the cotton price will make for further prosperous times."