Tallulah: Where Delta Air Lines Was Born

Tallulah is a quiet Delta parish seat today, but in the early nineteen twenties it was the unlikely birthplace of one of the world's great airlines. The United States Department of Agriculture set up a boll weevil research laboratory here, experimenting with aerial crop dusting to fight the pest devastating cotton fields across the Mississippi Valley.

A young Louisiana extension agent and aviation enthusiast named Collett Everman Woolman became close with the USDA entomologists in Tallulah. Huff Daland Dusters, the world's first aerial crop-dusting company, was founded in nineteen twenty-five, and Woolman, working closely with the company from early on, helped move its operations to Monroe, Louisiana that same year. Woolman bought out the company in nineteen twenty-eight and renamed it Delta Air Service, chosen for the Mississippi Delta country where it all began. Delta's first passenger flight took off on June seventeenth, nineteen twenty-nine. The airline that grew from those Louisiana cotton fields now carries more than two hundred million passengers a year.