Cotton Row, the block of Front Street under your feet, was once the commercial nerve center of the antebellum cotton economy and one of the most consequential streets in American economic history. By the 1850s, Memphis had become the cotton capital of the world. Millions of pounds of cotton arrived here each year from Mississippi, Arkansas, and Tennessee — picked by enslaved people, baled and shipped by a vast commercial infrastructure, and traded on these blocks for enormous sums.
The cotton factors — the brokers and merchants whose offices lined this street — controlled the flow of one of the world's most valuable commodities. After the Civil War, the sharecropping system replaced slavery but kept the cotton economy, and much of its wealth, concentrated in the same hands. The ornate iron-fronted commercial buildings along this block are some of the finest nineteenth-century commercial architecture in the South.
Walking here is walking through the physical evidence of a wealth built on human bondage. The buildings are beautiful and the history they represent is terrible. Both things are true at once, and Memphis has always had to live with that.