Pemiscot County, Missouri: History
Bordering the river and its floodplain, the county was devoted to agricultural development and commodity crops. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the major commodity crop was cotton, which was worked at the beginning mainly by enslaved African Americans.
After the Reconstruction era, four African Americans were lynched in the area, all during the early 1900s and in the county seat. This was a period of disfranchisement for Americans, and included heightened violence against them by racist mobs.
To escape such this mistreatment, many African Americans left the county in the Great Migration, moving to big cities to seek employment. Also, with the mechanization of agriculture requiring fewer laborers, the county's population has continually declined since its peak in 1940. In 1940, with 46,857 people Pemiscot County was one of the most-populous county areas in the state, behind only St. Louis city 816,048, Jackson County 477,828, St. Louis County 274,230, Buchanan County 94,067 Greene County 90,541, and Jasper County 78,705.