Osceola, Arkansas

Osceola is one of two seats of Mississippi County, Arkansas, sitting right on the river that gives the county its name. The settlement dates to the eighteen thirties, and the town was incorporated as Osceola in eighteen fifty-three. Mississippi County became one of the most intensively farmed stretches of cotton country in America, with the bottomland cleared and leveed throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Osceola today is a small city of about seven thousand, and the city itself is majority African American, a direct legacy of the plantation economy and the Great Migration that drew some residents north while others remained. The river here is wide, brown, and fast, still the dominant fact of the landscape.